I think what was most difficult about adapting Kafka's 'The Trial' for the stage was the fact that there's virtually no plot to speak of. Reading it on the page is one thing, but having to give that dramatic shape and meaning is something else entirely. It's very farcical and surreal, and I was glad to see that our performers--and I think this is one of the strongest casts we've had--were eager to embrace that, to explore and play with it, and offer their own interpretations, both of the script and of Kafka's novel. It was great to see how they were finding stuff in the script that I myself didn't know was there. That's the beauty, I think, of having such ambiguous and open-ended material. But with that ambiguity comes a lot of mystery, a lot of questions. What I wanted was the audience to feel K's panic and claustrophobia at all this confusion, as his world slowly closes in on him. That's where a lot of the story's horror and menace come from, but at the same time, for me at least, the novel is also a pitch-black comedy. After all, at some point, you just can't do anything in the face of all the absurdity but laugh. And I wanted some variety in there, so the play wouldn't be so unrelentingly bleak, to highlight the novel's black-comedy elements. For me, Kafka's 'Trial' is a great balance of all that, and, hopefully, this will come through in the final production.
Run of Show: January 17, 2018 >> February 18, 2018
Tickets: http://synetictheater.org/event_pages/the-trial/