Did the play have to be a newly found theatrical adaptation by Franz Kafka of his grotesquely dark novel, The Castle? Things are out of hand.
And that's precisely why Theresa Rebeck's ragingly funny The Understudy hits the mark from its first surprising minute to the last scene, when it dives into an incongruous surrealism that Kafka himself might appreciate.
The Understudy, a hit last season Off-Broadway, where I missed seeing it, is funny enough. But director David Kennedy's Wilma Theater production, which opened Wednesday, boosts it with a perfect three-member cast. The actors exploit The Understudy's wrinkles with characterizations that seem natural even when they're over the top, and with a laser focus that burns into Rebeck's text.
That script would be yet another insular story about the theater, but Rebeck - a facile weaver of detail into almost melodic plot - offers a full-length play without intermission that hits on status, cowardice, jealousy, greed, and sucking up.
So much for the play's serious undercurrent. The value of The Understudy is the pleasure it provides by drawing big-time laughs from this pool of human frailty, not one of them a cheap thrill. The jokes here are organic, straight from the characters' frustrations and from a subtle, lasting tension in the play's setup. That underpinning is taut enough - at least in this staging - to let the characters sometimes laugh together or momentarily appreciate each other or bare their own wires, even amid their deep-down distrusts.
