Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything
truly wrong, he was arrested.” So begins one of the most famous opening
lines in 20th-century literature, the first sentence of Franz Kafka’s
novel The Trial. The maze that would swallow the cipher-like
protagonist Josef K. gave rise to the familiar term Kafkaesque to
describe the unfathomable if not senseless, disorienting and
incomprehensible procedures of modernity. Although Kafka never finished
the novel, which was published posthumously, The Trial became a touchstone for the disaffected and was later turned into a suitably bizarre film by Orson Welles.
It is now a stage play starring puppets, marionettes and an alternative rock band. The Ballad of Josef K. by
Milwaukee Mask & Puppet Theatre finds novel ways to suggest the
various levels of meaning intended or suggested by Kafka’s text. The Trial is
usually read as an indictment of bureaucracy or the rule of law without
justice. As the Puppet Theatre’s puppet master Max Samson points out,
Kafka had other meanings in mind as well.
“The novel is partly
autobiographical,” Samson explains. “He’d broken up with a woman he was
supposed to marry and when he was called to her family’s home, they
browbeat him. He wrote The Trial during this period.”
But there is more.
“On another level it’s a spiritual novel—a Gnostic search for the
divine,” he continues. “Another level is political and another is about
sexual and power relationships between men and women. We didn’t want to
make the play a simple polemic on any one of these subjects. It’s
bigger than any one of its tracks.”
Nearly 20 years ago Samson mounted a marionette production of The Trial at a workshop in Connecticut.
The idea slumbered restlessly in his imagination. Years later Samson
was ready to work with Theatre X playwright John Schneider to produce The Trial when the long-running Milwaukee company folded. Samson and Schneider didn’t let go of the concept and staged a prototype of The Ballad of Josef K. at
Bucketworks two years ago. The new version is substantially different.
Schneider wrote the adaptation. “It’s hard to adapt a text that fills
your head with so many images, that treads the line between horror and
humor,” he says. “I felt immensely responsible for Kafka. I hated
leaving anything out!” But as it transpired, Schneider left out most of
Kafka’s words, which are difficult to mold into stage dialogue, leaving
a vivid
outline of the author’s thoughts and anxieties. Kafka’s literary
executor Max Brod, although justly criticized for some indiscretions,
did remarkable work piecing together a continuous narrative from a
hodgepodge of just-begun, halffinished and apparently completed
chapters—or what Brod took to be chapters.
The executor
determined the sequence of events and relegated to an appendix material
that stubbornly refused to fit. “Since we don’t know what Kafka wanted,
we decided we didn’t have to slavishly follow the book,” Schneider
says.
With director Rob Goodman as the remaining point of the creative triangle, the producers of The Ballad of Josef K. decided
to go with relatively few words, allowing the beauty and strangeness of
the puppets and marionettes to convey part of the story along with an
original set of songs by Minneapolis band Thunder in the Valley.
“We’re
not doing music as an underscoring, but as a way of commenting on the
inner lives of the characters,” Samson says. His puppets will sing and
dance during interludes of musical comedy. Three puppets are used to
represent Josef K., each one smaller than the last as the protagonist
is diminished by unfathomable circumstances. “The thing about puppets
is that they have an archetypal resonance,” Samson adds. “They are
representational beings doing the presentation instead of people.
It opens the mind to various levels of understanding.” Kafka wrote The Trial during
World War I, but as with all great literature, the ideas outlived their
author and still resonate loudly. “Aside from Kafka’s sheer brilliance
and heartbreaking humor, what really connects The Trial to our
own time is the protagonist Josef K., an intelligent person who feels
both victimized and responsible,” Schneider says. “It’s how I feel as
an American citizen right now.”
The Ballad of Josef K. runs
March 27-April 13 at the Marcus Center’s Vogel Hall. A free symposium
on “Civil Liberties Through the Prism of Franz Kafka’s The Trial” takes
place 8:30 a.m.-noon, March 29, at UWM’s Zelazo Center. The discussion
features Sen. Russ Feingold and a trio of academics, Marcus Bullock,
Claudia Card and Carol Stabile.
