By Joe Brown

Thu, Nov 13, 2008 (2 a.m.)

Don’t think of it as homework, but I’d recommend reading at least a capsule biography of Franz Kafka before heading off to see “Morphotic.”

Presented by Insurgo Theater Movement at the Onyx Theatre, Shawn Hackler’s adventuresome, ambitious and occasionally ingenious new play extracts, condenses and riffs on elements of the writer’s literary works and life circumstances: Born a Jew in pre-WWII Prague. Bullying bourgeois father and hectoring mother. Detested desk jobs. Sisters sent to their deaths at concentration camps. Hospitalized in a sanitarium for tuberculosis. Tormented by anxiety, depression and migraines. Death by apparent self-starvation.

In a Kafkaesque twist to his biography, the poor guy never even got to experience acknowledgment as a writer — he instructed his friend Max Brod to burn his collected writings, which Brod fortunately published posthumously.

There’s no better time than the present to tune into Kafka, whose prescient, dread-drenched and darkly comic stories — “The Trial” and “In The Penal Colony” among them — depict troubled people imprisoned in an impersonal and bureaucratic world.

“Morphotic” is an extended panic attack. Hackler, who also directed and designed the set and lighting, sets his play at “the very moment” of Kafka’s death, and in flashback, literalizes the crux of Kafka’s greatest hit, the short story “The Metamorphosis.” The author is merged with his neurotic and self-loathing character, Gregor Samsa, who famously wakes to find himself transformed into a loathsome insect. Confined to his bedroom, then an asylum, then the grave, Kafka, like Samsa, dreads work, responsibility and touch, is misunderstood and bullied by his family and lovers, and is (justly) paranoid about the intentions and actions of the looming State.

Hackler generously gives Kafka a co-writing credit on “Morphotic” (the word means “connected with, or becoming an integral part of, a living unit,” but the definition didn’t help me much when thinking about what it all meant).

The play is anchored by Cynthia Vodovoz’s remarkable performance as Kafka. Dark-eyed and deceptively frail-looking, she conveys panic and helplessness in pained (and painful-looking) insectoid movements. Vodovoz gets right inside Kafka’s neurosis and pain, and his searching insight and humor as well. And near the play’s conclusion, she delivers a hair-raisingly cathartic reading from Kafka’s letters.

Also noteworthy among the cast of 10, many made ghastly by German expressionist makeup, are Brandon McClenahan, a marker of solid normality as a country doctor, and Natascha Negro, who is never less than riveting in her triple roles as a maid, a spectral child and a bitter streetwalker.

Hackler’s staging is sprung with deliberate and often witty anachronisms and incongruities, including the choreography by Jenna Wurtzberger — it’s truly surprising and somehow apt when Kafka’s on-again, off-again fiance Felice teases her inhibited lover by shaking it to Beyonce’s “Bootylicious,” tauntingly lip-syncing “I don’t think you’re ready for this jelly.”

The multimedia elements designed by Gregg Gerrietts involve a somewhat superfluous projection screen providing images of the people and locations, including Kafka’s own indicting stare. The eerie soundscape of electro-ambient music, nerve-racking door knocking and well-chosen cover versions of such songs as “Nature Boy” are effective, but on the night I saw the play, it suffered from too many distracting glitches and sudden silences.

“Morphotic” is never less than engaging, but it is sometimes confusing and certainly overlong. Hackler really has something here, and I really hope he continues to develop and refine “Morphotic.” It’s intelligent and inventive theater, if not for everyone.