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 novel—a 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.”

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