New worlds Amerika and Frogz at the ART BY CAROLYN CLAY

Next to waking up as a bug, waking up in America would seem a piece of cake. But don’t be fooled: the "k" in Amerika (presented by the American Repertory Theatre at the Loeb Drama Center through July 10) stands for Kafka. This first, picaresque novel by the Prague-bound author of The Metamorphosis, The Trial, and The Castle brims with the dislocation and floating guilt that characterize those works, even as it tootles a bit crazily through a New World that never was. American Repertory Theatre associate artistic director Gideon Lester has adapted the work, which Kafka began in 1912 and never finished, dubbing it Amerika or The Disappearance. And the visually ingenious Dominique Serrand (he designed the set and the video and also directs) makes the subtitle stick: at the end of this collaborative journey of the ART and Minneapolis’s Théâtre de la Jeune Lune, Kafka’s eager immigrant, Karl Rossmann, evaporates into a cross between the heavens and the Wild West.

Published after his death, Kafka’s novel is a darker and more surreal riff on David Copperfield, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography. German teen Karl, "disposed of" by his parents after being seduced by a servant who bears him a child, docks in New York to embark on a series of degrading misadventures, first among the haves, then among the have-nots, many of whom (both groups) are uncharitable if not downright scheming or grotesque. Seduction and violence go hand in hand as the too-accommodating Karl is embraced, then abused or rejected, by a series of parent figures from a mistreated ship’s stoker to a wealthy "senator" uncle to a couple of ne’er-do-well scoundrels (a nastier version of Huck Finn’s duke and dauphin) to a rhapsodically German cook waggling her schnitzel.

Lester’s adaptation, like the book itself, is curious and funny, fragmentary and episodic: like Angels in America without the gay element, it’s a fantasia on national (as well as existential) themes. At the Loeb, it’s pushed along by sounds of chugging locomotives and wafting, pooling, video-like scenery glimpsed from a slow-moving train. But where Karl is headed is less a destination — though there is both optimism and mordancy in his final disappearance into the maw of the West, with the altogether loopy Nature Theatre of Oklahoma — than an assimilation in which self is absorbed into that big blot on the American soul: slavery. Karl’s black-comic journey, though sometimes redolent of a toot with Charlie Chaplin or Candide, is as frightening as what happens to Joseph K.

At the ART, however, it’s a cartoon adventure through a bleak if grandiose world characterized by mechanization and an absence of bearings, where, despite the mostly New York setting, Southern (among other) accents, 10-gallon hats, C&W music, and a hotel boasting 40 elevators and a basement full of bananas all melt into the vast pot of an America Kafka never saw. Lester retains the novel’s inaccuracies, from a Statue of Liberty raising a sword to a Hudson River bridge with one end in Boston. And Nathan Keepers’s geeky, physically facile Karl arrives in America with not only a suitcase, an umbrella, and a suit as tiny as Pee-wee Herman’s but also a female traveling companion (an empathetic Sarah Agnew) who’s part doppelgänger, part storyteller, weaving in Kafka’s prose even as she shares Karl’s perplexity, amazement, revenge fantasies, and despair. Called Fanny, this cream-clad figure turns up at the end as one of the trumpeting angels drumming up recruits for the all-absorbing Nature Theatre of Oklahoma and is described as Karl’s "usher," who’s been with him all along. As indeed she has, threading, with the aid of the streaming projections, in and out of the buffeted immigrant’s disorienting adventures.

If the linear Amerika is less than dramatic, it is emotionally unsettling and fun to look at — and it mines more laughs from Kafka than you might expect. Sonya Berlovitz’s costume designs range from canary-yellow hotel uniforms (one for a bully whose shoulders seem to extrude from his cheeks) to a square-hipped dirndl for the zaftig cook to all-American pimp wear in various loud or leathery hues. And the performers, who except for Keepers and Agnew take on multiple roles, merge vaudeville comedy with the Theatre of Cruelty. Of particular note is Jeune Lune’s Steven Epp, gutturally explosive as the wronged Stoker lurching about his crate of a ship’s cabin, slickly menacing as Frenchified scoundrel Delamarche, and screwily jingoistic as the bouncing Head Cook.

Not even Kafka Lite is a show for the kiddies — but in the hands of Imago Theatre, whose Frogz the ART is presenting at Zero Arrow Theatre (through July 10), Gregor Samsa might be rendered as cuddly as a June bug and as monumental as Paul Bunyan. At the matinee I attended of this delightful and unusual show, an audience ranging in age from toddler to coot was captivated by a human-size collection of ruminative amphibians, red-eyed gators, imperious penguins, and enervated sloths trying to give The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee a run for its money. Oh, and there’s "The Play About the Baby," an encounter between a rapt big-white-headed infant and a trio of giant rolling orbs that owes more to Popeye’s Swee’pea than to Edward Albee.

Imago is the brainchild of Carol Triffle, who trained with Paris clown/mime master Jacques LeCoq, and Jerry Mouawad; they founded the Portland (Oregon) troupe in 1979. An inter-species cash cow, Frogz was begat in 2000 and has since toured all over and subsidized for the company’s weightier works, which include Sartre’s No Exit performed atop a platform balanced on a pole. (That one comes to the ART in January.) This is its first appearance on the lily pad that is Cambridge, and though it’s comparable to the work of the Swiss mask troupe Mummenschanz, the droller, less abstract Frogz, performed to a Big-Top-meets-Middle-East score by ART Institute grad Katie Griesar, is a thing unto itself.

The opening title vignette features three pop-eyed croakers that spend their first few minutes just staring down the audience from a melancholy crouch. About the time the crowd starts to grow nervous, tapping, stretching, and hopping ensue. Eventually the yellow-green trio leap their way into the wings, making way for a pair of slithering alligators and their Seascape-worthy lizard companions. The aggressive yet lovable gators make the first of what will be several advances on an awed first row of the audience, which must imagine itself Captain Hook being pursued by the ticking Crocodile. Later on, a young woman will find herself locked in combat for her front-row seat with a large black-and-white unbendable couch of a penguin who is not taking no for an answer.

Most of Frogz’ 11 pieces are whimsical and imaginative, not to mention adroitly performed by a lean, lithe troupe of five dancers/acrobats/comedians whose faces we don’t see till the end, when the performers are transformed amid a storm of billowing tissue paper from red-enveloped forms into silver-suited young humanoids. One ingenious solo turn called "Larvabatic" has a sad-faced slug in a larva costume performing an acrobatic routine in which his legs are masked as arms and vice versa. And a piece built on shimmering, stretching, swirling midnight-blue strings is actually poetic. Then there are those musical-chairs-playing penguins: if Batman tried to do battle with them, he’d die laughing.