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Guilty or Not is an expressionistic trip through the American criminal justice system. It is a two-act, full-length play. After a long night of drinking, Pat Barlow is arrested for a crime he doesn’t remember. He goes to the police station for an interview, makes an initial court appearance, goes to the public defender’s office, returns to court, retains an attorney, returns to court again, goes with his attorney twice to the district attorney’s office, and makes a final court appearance, never completely understanding what’s going on. Legal scenes alternate with scenes in Pat’s apartment, and as he becomes more obsessed with the legal process, his relationship with his wife deteriorates and eventually disintegrates. The sets and scenes are intended to become more bizarre as the play progresses. In the end, Pat is convicted of an offense, though not the one for which he was originally arrested, and he reports to jail.
Similarities to Kafka’s The Trial are obvious and unavoidable, but the danger of this work being derivative was considered throughout its writing and I concluded that any portrait of the criminal justice system will inevitably bear a resemblance to that classic work.
Although the play is written around a conventional heterosexual marriage relationship, each part was conceived as potentially being played by a person of either gender.
