‘The Understudy’ is a Kafkaesque comedy about three people putting on a play

Imagine a smash-hit Broadway show based on a recently discovered script by Franz Kafka and starring an action hero.

“The Understudy,” in its opening weekend at Harlequin Productions’ State Theater, is set at a rehearsal for this peculiar play within a play. “It’s crammed with craziness and comedy and crises,” said director Scot Whitney.

And the Kafka play? Playwright Theresa Rebeck, a lifelong fan of the 20th-century surrealist scribe, invented it.

“It’s completely ridiculous,” Whitney said. “A three-hour Kafka play is a huge hit.”

Kafka — best known for “The Metamorphosis,” in which hapless Gregor Samsa awakens one day to find that he’s become a giant cockroach — is known for works that explore the pain caused by bureaucracy and by the way individuals react to it. (Kafka’s day job: insurance agent.)

“Kafka is a descent into despair,” said Whitney, who runs Harlequin with wife Linda Whitney.

“The Understudy’s” characters — action hero-turned-Broadway actor Jake (David S. Hogan), stage manager Roxanne (Jessica Weaver) and Jake’s understudy, Harry (Jason Haws) — find themselves descending, too. Among their difficulties: Harry is Roxanne’s ex-fiancé, having left her just weeks before the wedding.

“The whole world is crashing in on all three of them in all directions,” Whitney said. “Things go from crazy to worse.”

It’s Kafka through the looking glass. Rebeck, a prolific playwright who also wrote for “L.A. Law” and “NYPD Blue,” wanted to approach his themes from a different direction.

“I felt like this kind of mysterious, surreal tragedy of his work could echo in a comedic way,” Rebeck told David Gardener in a 2010 interview for the blog of the Wilma Theater in Philadelphia. “That’s what I was interested in. Could the things that were at stake tragically in the play being rehearsed be turned upside down and remain the same existential issues?

“Who is running the show here, and what does it mean to be human, and why are we so out of control of our lives?”

When he read the play, Whitney fell in love with it, but he was worried about how it would end. (In “The Metamorphosis,” Samsa starves to death and basically disappears.)

“I thought, ‘Oh, man, there’s no way she can end this play without everything being flushed down the toilet. It’s such a bummer there’s no way out of it,’ ” Whitney said. “Then in the last half page, Bam! Boom! It’s just so beautiful.

“I laughed out loud. My heart was so happy.”

He knew right away that he wanted to direct the show and figured out pretty quickly that he wanted to cast Harlequin regular Haws, who’s displayed an enormous range in past productions, and Weaver, who starred in “The Two Gentlemen of Verona” in the fall.

It was a challenge, though, to find an actor to play action star Jake.

“It’s a very tough role to cast in the Northwest,” Whitney said. “Guys who are macho guys — it’s the Northwest.”

Then he thought of Hogan, whom he’d seen in a couple of shows. Hogan, of Seattle, has recently been working mostly in films, starring in the 2016 action thriller “Paralytic.”

“I thought, ‘Where am I going to find an action movie star?’ and I wound up with one,” Whitney said.

This story was originally published March 2, 2017 at 7:24 AM with the headline "‘The Understudy’ is a Kafkaesque comedy about three people putting on a play."