WSC's 'Kafka': The Trials of Fame Prove Gleeful

Once you're a celebrity, everything means something, from the cut of your suit to how much you loved your mum. And that nauseates English playwright Alan Bennett, who two decades ago wrote a wickedly funny play that lays bare our obsessive need to know.

The comedy hasn't been seen much stateside -- could it be that puckish title, which refers to Kafka and a male part of the anatomy? -- but the Washington Shakespeare Company is having a jolly run at this scattered but lively play. This production by Joe Banno (a frequent Washington Post music reviewer) embraces the mess, with red-jacketed books strewn about the Alice-in-Wonderland checkerboard floor. The massive, off-angle shelves at the back of Hannah J. Crowell's set even look like an upside-down house that's crashed onto the stage.

That's a good metaphor for the topsy-turvy vision of Bennett ("The History Boys"), and possibly useful for Wendy MacLeod's "The House of Yes," which joins "Kafka's" in rep this week. Bennett's intellectual farce is driven by lickety-split dialogue and the cute idea of shooting the perpetually miserable Kafka -- author of the gloomy, paranoid masterpieces "The Trial" and "The Metamorphosis" -- into the 1980s, where he's been completely undressed by literary biography of the most gossipy sort.

Allusions and pranks run cheek by jowl as Kafka initially arrives in the modern British suburbs as a turtle (amusing on many levels, especially given Christopher Henley's shrinking performance as the reluctant writer), and as Bennett melds literary satire with hints of bedroom farce. The lady of the house is a buxom ex-nurse who spouts inane facts that her amateur-biographer husband passes along. Adrienne Nelson delivers these lines with cheerful confusion, although the character isn't quite as dim as she looks in Kimberly Dawn Morell's appropriately cliched sexy costumes -- a tight pink track suit and, later, a nurse's blouse and high heels.

It's all very antic and jampacked, and not the easiest thing to perform as actors juggle accents and the brainy punch lines that the script produces at a rapid rate. The machinery sometimes clatters more than it hums, especially come pell-mell physical business (like the keep-away game everyone plays trying to prevent the neurotic Kafka from discovering his posthumous notoriety) and arch asides that don't clarify and delight so much as add to the jumble.

But by and large, the jumble is gleeful, especially once Kafka's notoriously crude father crashes the party and demands his chance to rewrite history. Ian Armstrong comes at the role like one of "Saturday Night Live's" ol' Czechoslovakian brothers, only brutally paternalistic and remarkably loud.

This sublimely straightforward figure practically hijacks the play, which initially had belonged to Bruce Alan Rauscher's faintly strained bon-vivant turn as Max Brod, Kafka's friend and biographer. That Brod is dispensable, a fate nearly all the characters fear, is mercilessly illustrated by the humiliations heaped on him by -- well, is it Bennett? Or Kafka, whose wild dream they're all in?

Interestingly, Kafka is never really a commanding figure, although Henley delivers all the mopey anxiety that Bennett seems to call for. (Bennett took Kafka more seriously in another 1980s play, "The Insurance Man.") Kafka being Kafka, this is all a trial, as one character inevitably remarks, and while he sort of wants to be famous, he also wants to will himself out of the spotlight. What he wants hardly matters: The circus around him, Bennett says, will whirl away anyhow.

By Alan Bennett. Directed by Joe Banno. Lighting design, Andrew F. Griffin; sound design, Matt Otto. With Bryan Cassidy, John Geoffrion and Charlotte Akin. About two hours. Through Jan. 13 at the Clark Street Playhouse, 601 S. Clark St., Arlington. Call 800-494-8497 or visit http://www.washingtonshakespeare.org.