{image1}One of the interesting things about Franz Kafka's "The Trial" is that it never does get to the trial. Joseph K., a bank clerk and as average a Joe as you'll find anywhere, wakes up one morning for breakfast but finds himself under arrest. What for? Well, they won't tell him, in fact, they don't even haul him off to jail.

However, they do eat his breakfast. This is the beginning of his descent into an incomprehensible legal system that has no fixed place in geography, society or any recognizable body of law. He finds himself oppressed by a shadowy entity that seems to exist as a ghost, immaterial and formless, but substantial enough to haunt his every waking moment.

"The Trial" is a absurdist with a capital A, filled with strange characters propelled by incomprehensible motivations, and perhaps the most absurd of them all is Joseph. He tries to discover the nature of the charges against him but has about as much luck as Cortez hunting for El Dorado. Nothing makes sense.

The courtroom can sometimes be found in the back of a seedy, crowded apartment building, and sometimes it can't. At his bank job, he finds the two officers who arrested him in a closet being whipped for stealing his pajamas. His do-nothing lawyer comes equipped with a female employee who gets turned on by accused men, and enjoys showing off her webbed hand. Joseph himself makes a clumsy sexual overture to his neighbor for no good reason and finds himself becoming paranoid and anti-social.

A priest tells him a strange parable about a man who waits his entire life before a guarded entrance that was meant for him and him only, but he's never allowed to pass it. The only person who really seems to know the score is Titorelli, a decadent painter who does overblown portraits of the judges, but the insight of his artistry brings Joseph no comfort.

It's surreal, a parable on the futility of confronting a power that seems to come from nowhere and exists only for itself. As if in a dream, Joseph tries to prove his innocence, or at least try to find out what innocence means, and that dream - or nightmare - quality is reinforced with the boldest stage experiment you'll see this year.

"The Trial" is performed entirely by puppets, with actors handling them and speaking their lines for them. And what puppets! Commenting on performances puts me in a bit of a pickle, since the real stars of the show are Jeffrey Holub, Michael Pettit, Max Samson and Ian Tews, the puppeteers who have created a startling stage vision that beggars description. The puppets range from the tiny to the immense, the most memorable being a formidable judge that reaches to the ceiling.

With a sly creativity and artistic guile, the puppets turn in marvelous acting performances. Other production values include mobile scenery pieces and interactive sound effects that are cunningly integrated to convincingly present a world where Joseph's submergence in somebody else's madness becomes completely plausible. The experiment isn't completely successful, with some rough spots where focus gets split between the puppets and the actors manipulating them, but on the whole it's a satisfying effort that I can guarantee is like nothing you've ever seen.

With no knowledge of the charges, witnesses or a possible defense, "The Trial" will ring a bell with those who are familiar with the show trials of 1930s Communist Russia, where truth, guilt and innocence were all subordinate to political expediency. The eerie, frightening thing about that is that it's vision of judicial oppression based on phantoms has actually happened here in the West.

Earlier this year, a Canadian defendant named Ernst Zundel found himself deported, not on criminal charges, but because of a "National Security Certificate" that declared him a threat based on evidence that neither he nor his defense attorneys were allowed to see. In judicial notices taken during his hearing, the prosecution actually did claim that in his case, "Truth Is No Defense," "Intent Is No Defense," and that "The Fact That Statements Communicated Are True Is Irrelevant."

What the Patriot Act will bring here in America is yet to be seen, but the fact that it could happen at all in the Western world is pretty frightening. Kafka's vision is suddenly quite timely.

Presented by the new Post Romantic Theatre Company, which features many performers from the late and lamented Theatre X, "The Trial" is a creative, courageous and exceptionally different theatrical performance that probably won't be for everybody, but if you're feeling adventurous, I can highly recommend it. It plays at Bucketworks at 1319 N. Martin Luther King Blvd. through May 8. Call (414) 305-1324 for tickets.