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 novela 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.”
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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 chaptersor 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.
