(photo by Sunny Kaura)
Lost in Translation:
An office comedy where Kafka meets Seinfeld.
by Lisa McKeown
@lisammckeown
I was full of anticipation at opening night of The Memo. It seemed like exactly the kind of piece I'd love: a comedy that explored the political nature of language in a corporate environment. Written by Vaclav Havel - both a political dissident in Czechoslovakia and the first President of the Czech Republic - the play is a look into the absurd logic of bureaucratic management. It sounded like it was going to be both sharply entertaining and deeply interesting. And it lived right up to those expectations.
The play opens with a company Director attempting to read an official memo which has been written in a foreign language. Unable to make sense of it, he inquires about the language it's written in, only to find that the company is implementing an artificial language in an effort to make company communication more efficient. The Director then sets out on a quest to translate the memo, only to learn that the bureaucracy behind getting a translation locks him into an infinite loop of corporate logic. The perfect language, it turns out, is designed to describe the world so perfectly that there is no possibility of misunderstanding. But in order to achieve this, the language has to be so complicated that it's next to impossible to actually learn. The Director of the company finds himself on a Kafka-esque journey of attempting to find someone who understands the language well enough to translate it, and who at the same time has been granted the authority and documentation to translate it for him.
