Jessica Frey, Alex J. Gould, and Jessie Cannizzaro Photo by Morgan McDowell

These days, Americans are used to high-profile trials where, despite mounting evidence in the court of popular opinion, powerful and infamous defendants are found not guilty anyway. But playwright Laura Zlatos' rollicking new satire, Show Trial, harkens back to the Iron Curtain Era, when courts were propaganda venues serving to keep the public in line.

The playwright's giddy farce is based on a sobering occurrence, the 2005 discovery of audio transcripts of the 1950 trial in Prague of Milada Horáková, a Czech political activist who was part of an underground resistance against the Nazis, but, after the war, was accused of collaborating against the Communist Party.

According to the author's notes, most of the court audio was deemed unusable for radio broadcast because the defendant "continually went off script."

Director Tom Costello's swift and sharp production, performed by a cast of superb comedic actors, captures the playwright's vision of Marx, as in Karl, by way of Marx, as in Brothers. Designers Cat Raynor (set) and Patricia Marjorie (costumes) offer a thick layer of showbiz pizzazz over suggestions of stateliness, while sound designer Nicholas Webster supplies punch-line sound effects that seem straight out of the Warner Brothers animation department.

"Every line, each pas de bourrée must be performed exactly as written, or else the second act falls apart and Comrade Stalin kills us all," warns Chairman of the Judicial Senate, Karel Trudák (Brian Bock), at the trial's dress rehearsal, resembling a Broadway director more than a government official.

The prosecuting team is headed by Josef Urválek (Alex J. Gould), introduced as a party all-star and "the only one who knows what 'inculpatory' means." Joining him is the grim and humorless war hero Juraj Vieska (Tom Mezger) and hyper-energetic Ludmila Brožová (Jessie Cannizzaro), who is convinced that this trial is going to make her a star.

The last member is the inept Antonín Havelka (Justin Ahdoot), assigned to be the fall guy who gets blamed if anything goes wrong. Though he doesn't quite understand the concept of a scripted trial, Trudák assures him, "Facts are flexible when they're in service of something bigger."

Standing in the witness box, calmly observing the absurdity, is Jessica Frey as Horáková, who never surrenders her dignity while charges of being "a professional agent of Western imperialism and vegetarianism" are peppered for broadcast audiences by a slick commentator (Alex Mandell) offering play by play analysis. ("We're nearing the end of the second quarter and the prosecution leads 20,000 to zilch.")

Frey is most endearing in a touching flashback scene involving Horáková's pre-war relationship with her husband (Mandell), where they imagine the life they'll give to their daughter. But in an imagined scene set in the future, we get a glimpse of how their grown-up daughter (Kalusha Brutlag) has reacted to her mother's choices.

While Show Trial may remind American audiences of classic political satire films such as Duck Soup and The Great Dictator, it is also very reminiscent of some foreign plays that have make their way to New York, despite the censorship of the playwrights' home countries. A few years ago at La MaMa, the Czechoslovak-American Marionette Theatre presented Václav Havel's whimsical comedy Audience, which was illegally performed in apartments when first penned in 1975.

As the old adage goes, nothing strikes fear in the hearts of tyrants more than people laughing at them.