The Trial: A condemned man, in a dark burlesque of Kafka | Review

In Franz Kafka’s chilling novel The Trial, written in 1914, a respectable, unassuming bank administrator, Joseph K., awakens one morning – his birthday – to find two thuggish men in dapper suits having invaded his bedroom and placed him under arrest.

Strangely, he’s told he can return to his “ordinary life” while he awaits trial. From there, things only go downhill. He tries to find out what he’s guilty of but is never informed of the charges against him, lost in an increasingly labyrinthine, secretive bureaucracy.

Nearly 100 years after Franz Kafka wrote his existential thriller, an exciting stage adaptation of the novel by Seattle’s New Century Theater Company (NCTC) brings to life this story of dread, guilt, and alienation, in the appropriately musty, stifling offices of an old former immigrant-processing building in Seattle.

The music and sounds are compelling, the lighting macabre, and the costumes of office secretaries and bureaucrats strangely sexy, evocative of Weimar Berlin and its decadent nightlife (think Joel Grey and Liza Minelli in the musical Cabaret).

The unorthodox, but eerily fitting venue of this production makes it an adventure for the theatergoer. Staged in a chamber of the reconverted former U.S. Immigrant Station (operated by Immigration and Naturalization Service, before it became part of Homeland Security) now the Inscape Arts Building, it captures the “Kafka-esque” – nightmarish, weird – mood.

Here aliens were once processed for citizenship or detained in cells until their papers were approved; it was the last stop for Japanese Americans sent off to internment camps during World War II.

The Trial, which features several well-known Seattle performers, including Gregory Award winner Darragh Kennan (chosen “actor of the year” by Seattle Magazine in 2012) as the lead character Joseph K., and Amy Thone (also the recipient of a Gregory, honoring Seattle theater performers) as his lawyer, will be at the Inscape Arts Building for the next few weeks, through May 5.

In the influential original novel, published after the Czech writer Kafka died, in 1925, (but against his professed wishes), the plot revolves around the character’s struggles to understand his legal fate, at the mercy of a huge faceless, crushing bureaucratic machine that prefigured the modern Police State before Stalin and Hitler.

Playwright Kenneth Albers’ adaptation of the novel explores the comic possibilities of Kafka’s famously tragic, brooding character, presenting him as a 40-year-old virgin – a confirmed bachelor who’s lived in the same boarding house for 17 years, something of a hapless cog in “the court’s” mysterious, tyrannical proceedings.

The narrative of this play follows Joseph K’s attempts to navigate his way through this shadowy world of depravity and corruption, brilliantly played Darragh Kennan. The Everyman character is the “everyday guy feeling the pressures of society coming down on him,” says Kennan, also the play’s artistic director.

Kennan turns a spotlight on how Kafka’s protagonist is suddenly rendered more attractive to the women around him because of his newfound “bad boy” status.

Director John Langs’ dramatic staging and costumes evoke terror and dark comedy. The claustrophobia of the small stage is offset beautifully by Sound Designer Robertson Witmer’s masterful use of offstage shrieks and cries that suggest the brutal control of Kafka’s police state without descending into campy horror. The thugs who arrive at Joseph K’s door are well enacted by Michael Patten as Franz and Alex Matthews as Willem.

Albers chose to reverse genders on a few of Kafka’s characters for dramatic tension, adding a sexy dynamic to the play. Amy Thone is hilarious as Sophie Kleist, the lawyer comically wound-up in legal jargon, manically twirling about in a mechanical power wheelchair that’s weirdly reminiscent of Dr. Strangelove.

This adaptation also enlists the audience in the drama. Before the show even begins, you’re made to feel like a Joseph K. of sorts.

Upon entering the old INS building, you’re ushered into a holding area, by beautiful, long-legged, exaggeratedly made-up women, wearing white lab-coats over miniskirts, and told to wait for “processing” in one of several corrals indicated by painted tape on the floor.

Then you’re ushered past windows where you are watched by strange menacing faces, lit from below like macabre characters out of a noir film. Finally you’re taken up steep narrow stairwells to a randomly assigned seat, with muzak piped in. The steep wooden gallery created as part of the set is meant to feel like a jury box, with the audience functioning as jury.

Indeed, Director John Langs’ letter in the playbill reads, “Tonight Joseph will be put on trial. So will you.” He teases the audience further, “In fact your trial began when you walked into the hallway. In fact your trial began when you were born.”

Darragh, who played Hamlet for Seattle Shakespeare Company, describes the Kafka character as being a “very similar role,” characterized by wavering, indecisiveness.

“He fails to understand how he can take ownership of the situation, and take responsibility for his own choices,” he says.

If we look at the play in terms of our own lives and ask ourselves, says Kennan, “‘What have I not taken ownership of? What doors have I not walked through for x, y, and z reasons? What part of me is blaming other people or institutions?’, I’d like for people to think about that.”

The Trial is a sophisticated adaptation of complex themes that provokes audience engagement. One flaw of the production, however, is the closeness of the seats to stage, which allows audience laughter or noises to distract from the performance.

Langs makes a joke of this in the playbill, “Laughter of the right variety is encouraged. Laughter of the wrong variety is forbidden.” The potential for spontaneous, improvised interaction between actors and audience could be better seized.

However, a planned discussion session following the play had audience members heatedly talking about Kafka’s literal relevance today, in light of the Guantanamo Bay detention camp, the abuse at Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad, the Wikileaks scandal, and other current issues surrounding the War on Terror.

What better mark of success for the avante-garde NCTC? It’s a company that aims to produce “boldly theatrical plays that ask more questions than they answer, explore moral issues that test the human spirit and challenge audiences to do their own thinking.”