Reviews  

Kafka's "The Trial" Gets a Staging
by Irene Backalenick

Franz Kafka, a Czech Jew, was born in 1883, and wrote his noted novel "The Trial," during World War I. But he was amazingly prescient, predicting with stunning accuracy what the European world would be for Jews (and others as well) in decades to come.

Kafka's K was every victim caught up in an arbitrary, irrational and corrupt world. He is pulled from his bed one morning and suddenly arrested. K soon realizes it is no practical joke, and in mounting frustration and fear, he moves through the legal maze, struggling to discover his accusers and his supposed crime.

The 1916 novel, which was turned into a 1946 drama by Andre Gide and Jean-Louis Barrault, is now playing on the off-Broadway stage. The newly-formed Phoenix Theatre Ensemble has taken on the heavy challenge. (The company was launched by a breakaway group of five who left the Jean Cocteau Repertory to create a company in line with their own values. Their mission: to see that all theater artists are equal collaborators in the creative process.)

Though hopelessness is the play's permeating theme, it is shot through with comical and sexual scenes, much like a dream-or rather, nightmare. And though the playwrights capture Kafka's tragi-comic material in a series of staccato scenes, the play  never builds in an upward arc that moves with ever-increasing intensity. Thus "The Trial" loses the powerful impact it might have had in a better-structured dramatic piece-and indeed did have in the original novel.

Not surprisingly, the performances of these seasoned players outstrip the material itself, under the sure-handed, imaginative direction of Eve Adamson (also a Cocteau alumna). Many of these players have had years to hone their craft, as has Adamson. She gets top ensemble work from her 14-member cast, with John Lenartz in the lead as K. And her design team creates a neutral gray, black, white and tan world which offers no humanity and no relief to the embattled K.

Whatever its flaws, "The Trial" is an omen of good things to come from the Phoenix. And an opportunity to enter the world of Kafka, however painful, is not to be missed.