Azuka Theatre Collective at the Walnut Street Theatre, Studio 5, 825 Walnut St., through June 30, 215-546-1103, ext. 8

Kafka’s Metamorphosis, with its theatrical central image — the transformation of Gregor Samsa from bourgeois salesman to monstrous vermin — seems ripe for a stage adaptation. But it’s tricky. It’s Kafka’s masterstroke to keep us wondering: What is the transformation really? Can others see it, or is it only Gregor’s sense of self (one of his "uneasy dreams," perhaps)? Literature frees the imagination — but a play in performance can make things concrete.

Happily, Steven Berkoff’s adaptation is smart. The British-American enfant terrible playwright is noted for deconstruction, but here he does not impose a secondary vision on the original. He preserves Kafka’s irony and ambiguity: We still don’t quite know how Gregor appears to others.

This aspect is also well handled by director Raelle Myrick-Hodges — and by Edward Snyder as Gregor, in one of the finest performances of the season. Snyder has all the necessary vocal and physical virtuosity, but more important, he retains the character’s humanity. Even when executing the most extreme sounds and movements, Snyder lets us see the man trapped within. Very nearly as good (in a less showy role) is Thea Chaloner as Gregor’s sister, Greta. Alison Newton also impresses as the Mother, a part that in lesser hands could easily be exaggerated.

In Berkoff’s play, the family assumes greater centrality than in the original. But that too is faithful to Kafka’s theme, for Metamorphosis is also a satire on middle-class values. The Samsa family, accustomed to mundane creature comforts provided by their son, now have not only lost a breadwinner, they’ve gained an obscene, unpresentable pet. What are they to do?

It’s in this larger world that the Azuka production breaks down. Metamorphosis is juxtaposed between the surreal and the commonplace. The true horror of Gregor’s transformation is more apparent because his surroundings remain so normal. Even the family’s gradual disintegration must be framed against the routine home life that they continue to pursue.

Myrick-Hodges wants to defy convention. We can feel her trying on various avant-garde concepts without working them through. There’s too much pop culture cleverness laid over the text rather than derived from it (the Chief Clerk becomes a goose-stepping, Cindy Sherman self-portrait; the Lodgers are costumed like punked-out Elvis Presleys). If the family’s world looks as nightmarish as Gregor’s, we miss a good deal of the point.

Nevertheless, Azuka’s Metamorphosis is a compelling evening in the theater, enhanced by interesting use of sound, some good performances (and a superb one by Snyder), and most of all, the brilliance of its original source — as trenchant today as when it was first published, 85 years ago.

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