Savage Wonder to Stage Kafka's THE TRIAL With Five Actors Playing 25 Roles

Savage Wonder will stage its own adaptation of Franz Kafka's The Trial for four Saturdays in September, translated from German and directed by Founding Artistic Director Christopher Paul Meyer. Five actors play twenty-five parts.

Josef K. wakes up one morning and there are two men in his bedroom. They know his name. They will not say what he did. They tell him he is under arrest, spend ten minutes talking to each other about moisture and mice, and then suggest he go on to work.

Nobody in this play gets an answer. Not from the court, which never convenes. Not from the lawyer, who cannot help. Not from the clerk, who is genuinely sorry and is not permitted to say why.

The first people to hear it thought it was funny. Max Brod, who published the novel after Kafka's death, wrote that when Kafka read the opening chapter aloud to his friends, 'we friends of his laughed quite immoderately. And he himself laughed so much that there were moments when he couldn't read any further.' Productions since have mostly gone the other way, into dread and nightmare. This one goes back to the room where everybody was laughing.

Kafka began The Trial in 1914 and never finished it. He was a lawyer at an accident insurance institute, assessing injury claims by day and writing at night.

Five actors play twenty-five parts. In a court where nobody identifies themselves and the judge is never present, the faces keep changing.

The production is staged in Savage Wonder's 'flash-to-bang' style, the company's method since its founding: the cast rehearses the day of and performs that night, fully staged and ambitiously blocked, with no props, no costumes, and actors on book.

Featuring, Ana Anderson (GNIT, Private Lives, The 39 Steps, Speed the Plow and Savage Circus at Savage Wonder; Ride Down Mt. Morgan, regional), Mike Labbadia (a company regular at Bedlam Theatre; The Actor's Nightmare at Savage Wonder), Dylan Crow (What the Butler Saw and GNIT at Savage Wonder; the feature film As The Heathen Does), and Viet Vo (Black Curtain Society at Savage Wonder). Casting is by Jenn Haltman. Tech direction is by Joshua K Boniello.

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