Word: kafka
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...program for "The Trial" claims that Allan Piper's comedy playing this weekend at The Loeb Ex has nothing to do with the novel by Franz Kafka of the same name. An unfinished work published posthumously, Kafka's The Trial concerns a man's confrontation with a bureaucracy he cannot understand. He is tried for an unspecified crime by an enigmatic legal authority and all of his efforts to obtain justice result in frustration and a loss of human dignity. In the end, he is stabbed to death. Some critics call it an allegory of the quest for divine justice...
Allan Piper's production, on the other hand, is quite funny. In fact, it's a little crazy. The only similarity between the Piper and Kafka texts is that they are both stories of men fighting against loony justice systems...
Gladstone plays Zed with Woody Allen's-not Kafka's-angst, complaining and sarcastically barbing his detractors. Sometimes Zed's commentary is a little too clever to be seem spur of the moment as sarcastic barbs should, but the lines are funny nonetheless and Gladstone effectively conveys Zed's frustration at being in center of such a farce...
...Trial" isn't terribly deep. By invoking Kafka's name in the posters and programs, there is an expectation of higher meaning. The big joke is that there isn't really any meaning at all besides "Life sucks." There is no quest for divine justice. The show is sloppy and not terribly tight, but the actors have some great lines and are allowed to go nuts with their characters. Quick and funny, "The Trial" is a good time...
...refund since the first week of February -- and has lost her job washing laundry in a Chicago-area nursing home. "I'm looking for a job," she said, "but I haven't been able to pay the rent in three months." Her tax preparer, Betty Kafka, believes the IRS antifraud program has been poorly designed in ways that are "especially unfair to the working poor...