Mark Rozovsky & The Theater at the Nikitsky Gate

[On 27 and 30 September, I published a two-part post on Yuri Lyubimov, a world-renowned Soviet and Russian stage director, that included a 1990 interview conducted by Leonardo Shapiro.  That interview was published in 1991 in Bomb magazine.

[Leo Shapiro did that interview in the spring of 1990 when he was on a trip to Moscow to stage a play there.  The play was Kafka: Father and Son by Mark Rozovsky, which Shapiro had produced in English with his troupe in New York in 1985; now he was staging its Russian-language première at Rozovsky’s own theater, the Nikitsky Gate.

[During that same trip, when he interviewed Lyubimov, Shapiro also interviewed Rozovsky—except that that transcript was never published.  It exists solely in typescript, probably only in Leo Shapiro’s papers in the Archives & Manuscripts of the Billy Rose Theatre Division at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts—and in my own personal files.

[Rozovsky isn’t as famous as Lyubimov was; Yuri Lyubimov was at the height of his international renown in 1990.  Mark Rozovsky, though, was, like Lyubimov, also a rebel in Soviet days and ran a highly respected Moscow theater during the time that the USSR was transforming into the sovereign Russian Federation and the Commonwealth of Independent States.  Furthermore, Rozovsky got to Broadway: Strider, 1979-80.

[So, having profiled Lyubimov, with an interview appended, I’m going to try to do the same service for Rozovsky.  The added frisson is that very few people will have read the interview Shapiro did with this director-playwright.]

Mark Rozovsky is one of the most interesting contemporary Soviet theater directors.  In addition to writing for the stage, Rozovsky, 83, is also a theater director, screenwriter, composer, poet, and prose writer.  Mikhail Shatrov (1932-2010), a well-known Soviet and Russian playwright and screenwriter, has said about his colleague: “He is a phenomenon.  He does everything himself from start to finish: writing, directing, composing the music, and sometimes even performing.”

A multi-faceted artist, Mark Rozovsky has the title of People’s Artist of the Russian Federation (2004, “for great services in the field of art”).  He’s a Knight of the Order of Honor (1998, “for services to the state, a great contribution to strengthening friendship and cooperation between peoples, many years of fruitful activity in the field of culture and art”) as well as holding the Order of Merit for the Fatherland (2012, “for a great contribution to the development of national culture and long-term creative activity”).  Rozovsky’s a recipient of the Chekhov Medal (2005, “for Contribution to Russian Art”) and has twice been named Russian of the Year (2006 and 2012).

Mark Grigoryevich Rozovsky (Russian: Марк Григорьевич Розовский) was born Mark Semyonovich Shlindman on 3 April 1937 in Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky in the Russian Far East.  (Some sources erroneously say that Rozovsky’s birthplace was Petropavlovsk, sometimes also known as Petropavl, in what was then the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic.)  His father, Semyon Mikhailovich Shlindman (1905-67), was an engineer and an economist and his mother, Olga Konstantinovna Klempt (1906-76), was a dressmaker.

When he was just six months old, Mark Semyonovich’s father was arrested during Stalin’s Great Terror and spent 18 years in labor camps.  Olga Konstantinovna loved her husband greatly all her life, her son says, and when Rozovsky married his current (i.e., fourth) wife and they had a son, the couple named him Semyon Markovich, after Rozovsky’s biological father.

(Rozovsky is currently married to Tatiana Revzina, director and musical director of the Theater at the Nikitsky Gate, her husband’s theater.  Semyon Markovich is the couple’s only child.  From previous marriages, the director has two daughters, Maria and Aleksandra. 

(Maria Markovna Flyarkovskaya, née Rozovskaya, graduated, like her father, from the Faculty of Journalism of Moscow State University and works as the head of the literary department of the Nikitsky Gate Theater.  Her husband, Vladislav Flyarkovsky, is the host of News of Culture on the Russia-K (formerly Kultura) TV channel.  Aleksandra Rozovskaya is an actress at the Russian Academic Youth Theater in Moscow.)

Despite her feelings for Semyon Shlindman, Rozovsky’s mother married an engineer, Grigory Zakharovich Rozovsky, who offered her protection from prosecution and persecution.  Grigory Rozovsky adopted Mark Semyonovich.

Olga Konstantinovna Rozovskaya was half Russian and half Greek.  Semyon Shlindman, Mark Semyonovich’s biological father, was Jewish.  Later, the director-playwright said that Judaism wasn’t part of his life growing up.  Even so, he explained, anti-Semitism confronted him frequently—he was called zhid, the Russian equivalent to ‘kike”—and this experience impelled him to become active in Jewish causes and organizations even though he wasn’t a practicing Jew.

When he turned one year old, Mark Semyonovich’s Russian grandmother took him to live in Moscow, away from the harsh living conditions in Kamchatka.  There he had to survive World War II (or, as the Russians call it, The Great Patriotic War).  More than once, little Mark Semyonovich’s grandmother had to save his life by wrapping her body around his to protect him from the shelling.

In 1953, when the 16-year-old applied for a passport, Mark Semyonovich took the patronymic and surname of his stepfather: Mark Grigoryevich Rozovsky.  On his new passport, the boy wrote down “Greek” as his nationality                                                                                           

Rozovsky graduated from the Faculty of Journalism of Moscow State University in 1960 and the workshop of Konstantin Fyodorovich Isaev (1907-77), a Soviet screenwriter, playwright, and Nikolai Aronovich Kovarsky (1904-74), a screenwriter and literary historian, of the Higher Courses for Scriptwriters and Directors in 1964.  (We’d probably call this the Workshop for Advanced Scriptwriters and Directors; it’s a non-governmental institution for postgraduate professional education in Moscow.)

The young theater artist joined the Writers’ Union of the USSR in 1976 and was a member of the Community Council of the Russian Jewish Congress.

From its founding in 1958, Rozovsky headed the student theater of MSU known as Our House (or Our Home: Nash Dom), which became widely known.  (The theater, which has roots back to 1756, is considered the oldest theater in Moscow.)

In the 1960s, Rozovsky also worked on the Literaturnaya Gazeta (‘Literary newspaper’), a weekly cultural and political newspaper.  He also wrote for the magazine Youth, an illustrated literary and artistic magazine for young people where he published popular columns of satire and humor.  He also worked in radio.

After the closure of Our House by order of the party in 1969, the director staged performances at the Moscow Art Theater, Leningrad’s Tovstonogov Bolshoi Drama Theater, the Mikhail Chekhov Riga Russian Theater in Latvia, the Kirov Academic Opera and Ballet Theater in Leningrad, Leningrad’s Pushkin Academic Theater, the Lensovet Theater in Leningrad, the Moscow Mayakovsky Theater, Moscow’s Obraztsov Puppet Theater, and the Polish Theater in Wrocław.  He also helmed movies and television shows.

During the decade of the 1970s, theatrical activity completely captured the budding young journalist.  In 1970, he created the theater at the State Literary Museum and in 1974 he worked as the principal director of the Moscow Music Hall.

In 1975 he staged the first rock opera in the USSR, Orpheus and Eurydice, written by composer Alexander Zhurbin and playwright Yuri Dimitrin.  The première was staged at the opera studio of the Leningrad Conservatory on 25 July.  (Since the term “rock” had a negative connotations for the leadership of the Soviet Ministry of Culture, the production was called “zong-opera” [зонг-опера]—from the German  der Song [‘pop song’].)

In 1983, Rozovsky formed the Theater at the Nikitsky Gate (Театр У Никитских Ворот) in the Central House of Culture for Medical Workers and became its artistic director.  In the tiny theater with an auditorium accommodating just 70 spectators, he staged performances of Poor Liza (musical, 1989; from a 1792 story by Nikolai Mikhailovich Karamzin), Doctor Chekhov (theatrical fantasies based on the stories of Anton Chekhov, 1983), The Story of a Horse (musical, 1975, based on Leo Tolstoi’s story “Kholstomer,” Gorky Theater; New York City Off-Broadway: 1979 [as Strider]; Broadway: 1979-80), Romances with Oblomov (1992, based on the 1859 novel by Ivan Goncharov), Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya (1993), among others.

(Aside from the New York performances, productions of Rozovsky’s The Story of a Horse have also been mounted at the Royal National Theater in London, and in Madrid, Stockholm, Tokyo, Seoul, Riga (Latvia), Helsinki, and other cities.)

After the new theater was founded, it received the status of a professional studio theater on 1 January 1987.  The Soviet Ministry of Culture officially granted the Nikitsky Gate the status of state theater on 1 October 1991.

On 25 January 2012, the Nikitsky Gate Theater moved into new quarters.  After waiting more than 12 years, the new four-story building of a former revival cinema on Bolshaya Nikitskaya Street in central Moscow opened its doors as a new playhouse.

The new Theater at the Nikitsky Gate boasts a spacious new auditorium with comfortable seating for 198 patrons and good sightlines.  The stage is equipped with the latest technologies, including modern sound and light equipment.  The lobby is decorated in green and brown tones to create an atmosphere of coziness and comfort.  With all the modern innovations, though, the historical appearance of the 18th-century mansion has been preserved.

Rozovsky’s company includes some very prominent artists, quite a few with honors such as People's Artist of the Russian Federation and Honored Artist of Russia.  They perform a wide variety of theater pieces representing philosophical parables and musicals, poetic performances and comedies, dramas and tragedies.  Currently, the Nikitsky Gate has more than 40 performances in its repertoire.  Rozovsky constantly adds new plays to the troupe’s catalogue.

Beyond the troupe’s performances at their home theater, Rozovsky and his Nikitsky Gate company participate in festivals both across Russia and around the world. 

In addition to his directorial work, Rozovsky’s the author of plays: Vysotsky’s Concert at the Research Institute (about actor, poet, singer-songwriter Vladimir Vysotsky), Kafka: Father and Son (produced in New York City in 1985 and 1991, and in Russia in 1990; see the interview with the playwright following this profile and my post on Rick On Theater on 5 and 8 November 2015), Triumphalnaya Square (about Soviet stage director Vsevolod Meyerhold), and Songs of Our Yard (favorite songs of the Soviet past played outdoors in the inner courtyard of the theater with spectators singing along).

Rozovsky is also the author of the screenplay for the three-part TV miniseries D'Artagnan and the Three Musketeers (based on the 1844 novel by Alexandre Dumas père, 1979) and the libretto for the opera Columbus’s Fifth Journey (to music composed by Aleksander Smelkov; presented at the Saint Petersburg Chamber Opera, 1994).

Rozovsky has been active politically as well as artistically.  In 1996 and 2003, he was among the cultural and scientific figures who called on the Russian authorities to stop the war in Chechnya and proceed to the negotiation process.

In October 2002, during the hostage-taking at the theater center in the Dubrovka section of Moscow, which resulted in the deaths of at least 170 people at the hands of Chechen terrorists and government forces, Rozovsky, whose 14-tear-old daughter Aleksandra was held hostage, took part in the live broadcast of Savik Shuster’s talk show “Freedom of Speech” on the television channel NTV.  Rozovsky called on Russian President Vladimir Putin to end the war in Chechnya immediately.

In 2007-2008, he was a member of the Supreme Council of the liberal political party Civil Power.

After the annexation of Crimea to Russia in March 2014, together with a number of other well-known figures of science and culture in Russia, Rozovsky expressed his disagreement with the policy of the Russian authorities in Crimea.  His position was set out in an open letter published in the socio-political newspaper Novaya Gazeta, known for its critical and investigative coverage of Russian political and social affairs.

Mark Rozovsky stresses the elements of poetry, psychology, and humanity in his productions.  But almost all of them also have a political aspect as well.  Before 1991 and the fall of the Soviet Union, his plays were unambiguously opposed to Soviet regimentations, suppression, and censorship.  

For a time, after Our House, the student theater, was closed on party orders, Rozovsky was blacklisted.  He heard from a friend that he was on a list of performers who were forbidden to appear on radio and television and he had to rely on friends to help him get directing jobs away from Moscow, such as Leningrad, Wrocław, and Riga.

Even after the Soviet Union dissolved, Rozovsky continued to emphasize his main focus—freedom of speech.  He saw the rise of fascism and nationalism in Russia and spoke out against it vociferously, both from the stage of the Nikitsky Gate Theater and in person.  He even had a running verbal battle with ultranationalist politician Vladimir Zhirinovsky, leader of the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (a misleading name).

*  *  *  *

[After having smuggled the script out of Russia, where production of the play had been forbidden by the Soviet Ministry of Culture, Leonardo Shapiro presented the world première of Mark Rozovsky’s Kafka: Father and Son with his troupe, The Shaliko Company, at the La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club in Manhattan’s East Village from 28 February to 24 March 1985. 

[After Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev initiated his policy of glasnost, or ‘openness,’ in 1986, Rozovsky was permitted to stage the play at his Theater at the Nikitsky Gate and he invited Shapiro to come to Moscow to direct it.  Rehearsals were in April 1990 and the Russian (and Russian-language) première was in May.

[Kafka is a two-character play that’s essentially a debate between writer Franz Kafka and his domineering father, Hermann; there’s little plot to synopsize.  The play depicts the strained relationship between the Son and the Father, which Peter Wynne of the Bergen County, New Jersey, Sunday Record described as “the classical Oedipal struggle”—though I say it’s more complex than that. 

[Shapiro said that he saw Kafka as “a Jewish family play, a play about fathers and sons,” but added that it was also “a warning about the new wave of repression of the creative spirit building here in the United States.”  The Minister of Cullure certainly saw the tyrannical Hermann Kafka as a stand-in for the repressive Soviet state and Franz represented the Russian artists—which is why he banned the play in 1983 

[The text of Kafka: Father and Son was based mostly on a letter Franz Kafka wrote, but never sent, to his father (“Letter to His Father,” November 1919) and parts of “The Judgment” (1912), Kafka’s most autobiographical story.  (I posted a two-part report on Shapiro’s productions of Kafka on Rick On Theater on 5 and 8 November 2015.)

[Because this was a typescript and not a published interview, I have taken the liberty of editing what I believe were typos.  I’ve also broken up a couple of very long passages, but I haven’t rewritten anything; I just split up the paragraphs into smaller units.]

INTERVIEW WITH MARK ROZOVSKY
by Leonardo Shapiro
Moscow, April 1990
Rozovsky’s words translated by Steve Nielsen

This conversation between playwright Mark Rozovsky and Director Leonardo Shapiro took place at the Nikitsky Gate Theater in Moscow in April 1990, preceding rehearsals on Rozovsky’s Kafka: Father and Son.  (The transcript begins in mid-conversation referring to a moment in Mark Rozovsky’s play when Kafka’s father says, “I’ll kill you.”)

Leonardo Shapiro:  I think that that was the one spot that was the hardest for us in New York.  Because the way we played it, it didn’t seem that at that moment the father was upset, it seemed like a moment of rest.  So it was very hard for us to find the logic of your introducing the idea of killing the son.  When did you write the  play?

Mark Rozovsky:  I don’t remember anymore.  I think it was in 1980, maybe 1981.

LS:  What gave you the idea?

MR:  By the way, the moment we were just discussing is very much like what prisoners in this country [i.e., the Soviet Union] lived through under [Joseph] Stalin [leader of the USSR, 1922-53].

LS:  Who?

MR:  Those who were interrogated by the KGB [Committee for State Security – the Soviet secret police].  I can understand those who confessed under torture, but there were a great many instances, and a lot of documents on this are appearing today, when the investigator did not subject the prisoner to physical torture, but got him to confess by other means entirely.  There were, of course, the standard provocations and games of nerves on the part of the investigator, but there was a huge number of cases when the accused confessed to a whole series of sins that, it was clear to everyone, he had not committed.  He would dream up a whole world.

LS:  To make them stop, or because he believed it?

MR:  It was a type of artistic fantasy.  It was complete delirium.  He dumped on himself, as they say.  [Russian theater avant-gardist Vsevolod] Meyerhold, for example, confessed that he was an English spy, a Japanese spy . . . .  The torture came later.  And  it’s a little strange to read about it today.  It’s like Kafka’s world was at work.  The more the victim confesses, the more he disarms his tormenter.  The more he surrenders the less chance there is of his being further persecuted.

LS:  Do you know the Kafka story “The Penal Colony” [written in 1914 and published as “In the Penal Colony” in 1919] where there’s a machine that carves the sentence into the prisoner like a tattoo?

MR:  Kafka had a lot of insight into the world of fascism and “socialism.”  It’s astonishing.  There’s only one other writer who had such insight into our times, [novelist Fyodor] Dostoevsky.

LS:  What actually led you think of this?  Were you thinking of that and looking for a way to write about it and then happened upon this letter to his father, or were you interested in Kafka and then you put these two ideas together?

MR:  When a volume of Kafka’s works was published for the first time [in the Soviet Union], in the ’60s, he immediately was widely read here.  There were even a lot of jokes at the time about Kafka.  And Kafka became a sign of a new style of life, new furniture, a modern sofa, the hallmark of a new cultural awareness.  It was fashionable to have Kafka on your bookshelf. 

We would gather in each other’s kitchen, with a bottle of vodka, and discuss Kafka.  It was, of course, a serious interest on the one hand, but on the other hand, Kafka, like a picture of [American writer Ernest] Hemingway, was to be found in all of the more or less cultured homes.  Which I considered terrible. 

Then, strange as it may seem, in the ’70s, the Kafka fashion passed.  People, with a very few exceptions, stopped reading him and lost interest in him.  But I had the feeling that the world in which we were living had become even more Kafkaesque. 

Furthermore, in 1968, the events in Czechoslovakia started with a discussion of Kafka.  Kafka continued to be the writer on whom our freedom and spirituality were tested.  And I wanted to write a play about Kafka because those times remain important to me. 

[Known as “The Prague Spring,” the “events in Czechoslovakia” in 1968 was an upheaval when reformist Alexander Dubček was elected First Secretary of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia and attempted to grant additional rights to the citizens of the country.  The effort continued until the Soviet Union and other Warsaw Pact members invaded the country to suppress the reforms.]

I could have written a play based on The Trial [novel written between 1914 and 1915 and published posthumously in 1925] and that was the first thing that occurred to me.  It was like no other novel, in that it was similar to what our history was covering up.  But I decided, precisely for this reason, that I would not do The Trial and that was the first thing that occurred to me.  It reflected that history too clearly. 

And when I reread Kafka’s stories and the letter to his father, it seemed to me that these two things could be joined together, making a more profound, more indirect work.

LS:  Yes, it’s a great idea.  It’s much more interesting to create something new out of the combination of Kafka’s actual personal life and the creation of his actual imagination.  I think it gives you more freedom, and it also makes a connection between the personal and the social without having to spell it out.  The more detailed, real, and specific the story, the more weight it can carry.

MR:  Yes.  In what I was just saying, I was stressing the political side.  But Kafka’s strength is that he was able to translate the psychology of a man, the secrets of his inner “I.” 

For example, what are tenderness and caresses?  In Kafka they are the first signs of sadism.  We have become accustomed to violence, a cult of direct force against the weak.  But if I counter that violence with tenderness and gentleness, that force dissipates. 

And I also discovered that Kafka loved life, and his works are life affirming.  The morbid nature of his work and his inner depression are a means of doing battle for his love of life. 

Many people in this country rejected Kafka because he seemed so abject.  But that is not at all true.  He had a great love for life and for man.  And he, perhaps more than anyone else, was capable of joy. 

But the world around him was unjust and harsh, and it was only in his works that he opposed that world.  Only in art did his personality become absolutely free in this captive world.

And now, forgive me for putting myself in league with Kafka, this way of life has become my way of life.  Because, the only way of surviving those years was to write “for the desk drawer,” to write for the salvation of one’s own identity, as Kafka did, and be free only in art.

And this gave rise to a paradox: a blank sheet of paper, a pen, ink, a table and a chair, mothing more, and that is me. 

But out there is a huge world, a colossal bureaucratic machine, the army with its tanks and rockets, the navy with its aircraft carriers, the Ministry of Culture, and thousands, tens and hundreds of thousands, millions of people in the service and in the pay of the system.

And only one man stands up against that system, one man with a pen and blank sheets of paper.  And his only act is, from morning to night, from left to right, writing his manuscript.  That is how Kafka worked. 

But that is how, in this country, [Soviet writer, novelist, and historian Aleksandr] Solzhenitsyn worked, too.  And when that manuscript came to be called The Gulag Archipelago, it turned out that that manuscript, written by one man holding a pen in his hand, was mightier than the whole world  with its army of millions and its bureaucracy of millions. 

[Solzhenitsyn wrote The Gulag Archipelago, a non-fiction book about the Soviet forced-labor camp system, between 1958 and 1968.  (GULAG is the Russian acronym for the Main Directorate of Camps  –Glavnoye Upravleniye Lagerei.)  Seized by the KGB in 1973, a copy of the manuscript was smuggled out of the Soviet Union to Paris where the first Russian edition was published that year.  Translations into French and English followed the next year.  The book became a worldwide sensation; in the USSR, it was circulated in samizdat underground publication (literally, ‘self-published’).

[Solzhenitsyn’s Soviet citizenship was revoked in 1974 and he fled to West Germany.  In 1976, he moved to the United States.  Shortly before the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, Solzhenitsyn’s citizenship was restored in 1990; four years later, the famed writer returned to Russia, where he lived until his death at 89 in 2008.]

Who comes out on top?  The individual holding a pen, or the global system that is, in its entirely, opposed to that individual, against that one man?  The system, it turns out, is powerless, and is capable of only one thing—killing him.  It can do nothing more, because in every other regard, that individual is stronger. 

It’s very simple.  But in order to live thus, one has to have a remarkable inner strength, great talent, and faith in God.  By faith in God, I mean, above all, a sense of God in yourself.  And the messianic element in Kafka is to be found in all of the great Russian writers.

LS:  A strange Messiah.

MR:  Yes, strange, to be sure.  Therefore, here in the Soviet Union, to this day, Kafka has not been understood sufficiently profoundly.  I have in mind here the general reader.  There are, of course, some people who understand him very well, but the bulk of the readership does not understand him.  When the play [i.e., Kafka: Father and Son] is ready, I am sure that we will encounter this misunderstanding.  There will be some who understand thoroughly, and some who understand nothing at all.  And we must be ready for that.

LS:  What does that mean, ready for it?  Physically ready?

MR:  (Laughs.)  Perhaps.  We have to be ready in every way.  Perhaps you mean we should prepare ourselves by swimming laps?

LS:  In the play, when the father orders Kafka to write and Kafka writes, what does he write?

MR:  Who needs to know, the actors, the audience, or you? 

LS:   Well, in terms of the audience, there’s two choices: one is that he writes the story that he hands to the father later, and the other is that he doesn’t.  It’s either that or they don’t know what he writes.  He says that it’s his confession.

MR:  The son is describing his relationship with his father, as a result of which he perishes.  He makes an artistic image of him, and takes him from the world of everyday life into the world of art, the world of imagination.  And in that world he describes his demise as a result of what happened in the real world.

Shaliko’s 'Kafka: Father and Son,' Part 2

[As I wrote a few days ago in the introduction to the first part of “Shaliko’s Kafka,” this seems like a good time for an examination of the three productions by Leonardo Shapiro’s Shaliko Company of Mark Rozovsky’s Kafka: Father and Son.  I see it as a kind of companion to my report on Yukio Ninagawa’s Kafka on the Shore (posted on ROT on 11 September) which I saw in July.  I invite readers to go back to Part 1 (posted on 5 November) for an explanation of how I came to know these productions and for a run-down of the backstory of the three mountings.  Part 1 also includes biographical sketches of both the playwright and the director; Part 2 below is a discussion of the three productions of the play, the 1985 world première at the La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club, the 1990 Russian-language première at Rozovsky’s own Nikitsky Gates Theater in Moscow, and the 1992 Shaliko revival at La MaMa.  I’ve included a survey of the critical record for all the productions, including the Russian one.  ~Rick]

THE PRODUCTIONS

Leonardo Shapiro’s productions of Mark Rozovsky’s Kafka: Father and Son, though there were changes in the mise-en-scène from staging to staging and, since the casts were different, in the performance approaches, all shared some fundamental aspects.  “I wanted the whole theater to be a direct analog of the creative act itself,” explained the director.  “I was interested in setting up metaphorical space where the dialectic between creativity and authority could be played out in the present tense.”  He laid out the foundational image on which he based his staging concept:

[I thought of] a room where people seem to get bigger or smaller as they move from one part to another.  I remember a place like this somewhere on the road from Minnesota to Florida when I was a kid traveling with my mother in her Nash Rambler in 1952.  Anyway, this room in Tennessee or somewhere made me, at one end, bigger than my mother at the other.  In 1984 I taught a course in creativity at a college in New England; I had a book on consciousness that had a picture of a similar room from the Exploratorium in San Francisco.  I wanted a room in which Kafka’s and his father’s relative size was changeable.  I was also fascinated by the idea of making literal the metaphorical values of stage space (“blocking”).

The director’s notion was to create a space where “the action of the play literally takes place within a construct of Kafka’s imagination.”  This ultimately gave rise to the ideas of mirrored panels in the 1985 première at La MaMa and mobile Venetian blinds or jalousies in 1990 in Moscow and 1992 at La MaMa which changed the size of the space and even the relationships between the two Kafkas.  (Shapiro liked interactive sets—often accomplished with low tech because of The Shaliko Company’s constant impecuniousness.)  The playing area was bisected right to left by the frames but they moved progressively to a steeper and steeper angle.  When the blinds were used, they opened and closed to reveal Kafka, the Father, in varying amounts.  When closed, Kafka, the Son, was sometimes silhouetted against them.

The lynchpin for this concept, however, “was putting Kafka’s desk between the audience and the stage and structuring a running joke into the piece of Kafka sitting down to write and instead talking intimately in close-up to the audience.”  The actor’s eyes and face were lit by a desk lamp that left the rest of the sparsely-furnished room dark.

Shapiro intended to “make every scene as different as possible from every other scene.”  He set every scene in a different place: a bathroom, a bedroom, a Prague street, Franz’s study, and so on.  Then he “came up with tricks: a different visual space, a different visual trick, a different lighting trick for each scene.”  In some of the Son’s scenes Shapiro raised the house lights to prevent the total isolation of the actor from the audience—the character is supposed to be alone in a world of his own making, but the director always strove for a connection between spectators and performers—and some dialogue was delivered in a non-Realistic rhythmic manner. 

The world première of Kafka: Father and Son ran at La MaMa from 28 February to 24 March 1985.  The set designer was Derek McLane, the lighting was designed by Blu (the professional name of William Lambert), and the costumes were from Catherine Zuber.  The cast for the production was Sam Gray as Kafka, the Father, and Christopher McCann (one of the founding members of Shaliko in 1972) as the Son.  Rozovsky hadn’t even been allowed by his government, then under the leadership of Konstantin Chernenko, to come to New York to attend the début of his own play.  “When I first read the play,” wrote Shapiro, “I was struck by how many fathers and sons—but especially fathers—there seemed to be in the dialogue. . . .  My first thought was multiple casts.”  Discarding that idea as impractical, the director rethought: “My second idea was mirrors.” 

I liked the idea of Kafka surrounded by images of his father (or of himself), of the father being able to appear and disappear instantly on one side of the stage or another. . . .  It was a room divided by thirteen rectangular panels, each approximately ten feet tall and two and a half feet wide, with a roughly equal amount of space (two and a half feet) between them.  On one side, they were wallpapered and on the other, they were mirrors.  Each mirror was on a spindle with a little homemade axle and a separate wire, running invisibly to the back of the theater where two very busy and stressed out young techies had to manipulate all the mirrors together, separately and in sequence as if they were a real computer board on Broadway.

The mirrors, admitted Shapiro, were “gimmicks” or “tricks” that “could make the son be surrounded by ten fathers.”  Shapiro always liked gimmicks and stage tricks, and he’d been a devotee of stage magic since he was a boy, and mirrors, like other effects, such as masks, he used in his productions, are magical.  “They could make the father appear or disappear in any place and the same with the son,” he explained.  “So you could have somebody actually be offstage and then turn a certain number of mirrors and have him suddenly appear onstage.”  Shapiro stated that Rozovsky’s original text had no movement at all: it was just talking heads, like a radio play; but the intent of the mirrors was “to give a sense of the duplicity of the world of appearances.”  Shapiro and McLane worked all the effects out on scale models, testing all the angles of the mirrors for each scene.  Despite all this, one thing was not to scale: Shapiro’s and McLane’s eyes.  Nevertheless, the mirrors worked out technically but Shapiro was not happy with the overall effect, feeling that it tied him to “the world of appearances” instead of freeing him from it. 

The Soviet Ministry of Culture officially banned Kafka: Father and Son’s abortive Moscow première in 1983, observed Shapiro, while in New York, the lack of critical attention did the job with equal effectiveness: the play “was not ‘banned,’ but was painlessly invisible—no confrontation required.”  The New York Times didn’t send a reviewer at all and most other dailies of that era habitually ignored Off-Broadway and, especially, Off-Off-Broadway.  Of the few mass-circulation outlets that did cover this world première, the Village Voice, a publication with a reputation for reviewing off-beat performances, disliked the production.  Robert Massa dismissed Rozovsky’s script:

Clearly there are compelling links to be made between Kafka’s life and his fiction, but on a stage this cherished academic exercise seems pointless. . . .  Rozovsky tries to unravel [“The Judgment”] into its raw material, wrongly assuming he can capture the artistic process in reverse.  He loses the cool detachment and immaculate pacing that fire Kafka’s tale, leaving the actors little to do but randomly, repetitively, and pretentiously bounce subtext off each other.

Massa judged Shapiro’s directing “as arty and reductive as the script” and specifically criticized the “Chorus Line wall of mirrored panels” that made “the actors spend part of the evening bouncing subtext off reflections of each other.”  The Voice review-writer then recounted:

At the first public performance, the audience’s giggles suggested that the piece has potential as grotesque camp in the Edward Gorey vein. especially thanks to Christopher McCann’s wry, tense performance as Kafka junior—with the slight dip in his walk, he always seems about to break into a tango.  But the biggest giggle came on the line “We will never finish talking,” which arrives just when you’ve begun to wonder whether it may be true, though the production lasts only an hour.

As a conclusion, Massa averred: “As a portrait of tedium, this evening, unintentionally, is truly Kafkaesque.”

The only daily paper to run a review was Bergen County’s Record in New Jersey.  Peter Wynne started his notice by asking: “Could there be a better way to explore the life of writer Franz Kafka than in a Kafkaesque play?”  He characterized Rozovsky’s play as “brief but intense” and reported that the Russian playwright “brings a bluntness, a brutality that’s not to be seen on our native stage.”  Wynne felt that, though “a slow starter,”  the “presentation becomes more and more hallucinatory, the play’s power grows beyond the ordinary, and what seemed just another rehash of pop psychology becomes something much more artful.”  “[S]taged insightfully” by Shapiro, the reviewer affirmed, “by the play’s end the viewer’s sympathy is for both men.”

The only other timely coverage of Kafka was a pair of fringe papers.  In the New York City Tribune, a paper meant to pick up the mantel of the renowned New York Herald Tribune but published by the Unification Church from 1976 to 1991, Sy Syna wrote:

This unusual two-character drama with surrealist trappings is brilliantly performed.  But, like a pair of mice in a treadmill, the text forces [the two Kafkas] to go around and around with their agonized relationship to the point of monotony.

Syna finished up by saying of the “mutual love-hate relationship” shared by the two men that though it’s “initially fascinating, the sameness of each encounter begins to pall, despite the superb performances.”  In the Villager, a neighborhood weekly, Steven Hart declared, “There are three actors in” the Shaliko production of Kafka: Father and Son.  “They are Sam Gray as the father, Christopher McCann as Kafka and Derek McLane’s simple and powerful set.”  Hart explained: “All the elements of this production work together to shape the dissonant harmonies of Kafka’s world.”  After lavishing extravagant praise on Gray’s and McCann’s performances and Shapiro and McLane’s scenic concept, Hart complimented Rozovsky for “a script of great literacy” and Elena Prischepenko for translating it with “wit and grace.”  He closed by insisting, “I submit that ‘Kafka: Father and Son’ is the real thing.”

Paul Berman of The Nation, publishing after the production closed, lamented: “Kafka: Father and Son, by Mark Rozovsky, arrived at the morgue recently after receiving, as far as I know, no more than two paragraphs of mention anywhere—and those paragraphs a spade and shovel. . . .”  The Nation reviewer went on to assert:

The play has some of the intensity of Kafka himself . . ., an intensity that comes from enormous compression of thought and feeling, so that every line carries a truth on the surface and another truth below and an electric charge from one to the other. . . .   [T]here were brilliant aspects, too, which managed to distort the sense of distance between audience and stage so thoroughly that Christopher McCann, who played Kafka the Son, seemed to loom as if in a close-up, like one of those famous photographs of Kafka’s face and haunted eyes. . . .

The Nation reviewer had some reservations.  Though Berman acknowledged the “brilliant aspects, too,” he felt that Shapiro was “a little techno-happy and broke the audience’s concentration by means of off-stage loudspeakers and mirrors that revolved undependably.”  Returning to his opening premise, however, Berman concluded, “And to think that such a play has come and gone without an escort of critics waving and shooting fireworks.” 

Irrespective of Shapiro’s disappointment with the press coverage or the mirror effect, the show was successful  and, the director asserted, Kafka: Father and Son “for some reason, sold out—this was a popular show.  We had standing room every night.”  Good reviews in Russian of the La MaMa production got back to the playwright in Moscow.  Shapiro’s première mounting of Kafka: Father and Son closed just as glasnost was beginning in the Soviet Union and Rozovsky felt free to stage his own play at his own theater.  He asked Shapiro to come to Moscow to direct it.

Rozovsky revised his script between pre-glasnost 1985 and its first Russian-language performance in 1990 and Shapiro rethought the production concept as well, “making it more musical, more dreamlike, more theatrical, and clarifying and sharpening the political and aesthetic content,” the director wrote in the 1992 Kafka program.    The director traveled to Moscow in December 1989 to cast the show and confer on the design.  Rozovsky was away in Minsk, then the capital of the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic of the Soviet Union (now the independent nation of Belarus), on tour with the Nikitsky Gates company—and, due to a miscommunication with Gregory Speransky, the company’s technical and administrative director, the “respected artist” whom the playwright had selected to make the new design was out of the country.  Shapiro examined the rendering of the set, a “standard proscenium box set, very twenties deco elegant, but ultimately two guys sitting around a table talking.”  It was “very beautiful, but flat,” remarked Shapiro, and he decided, “This wasn’t what I had in mind. . . .  I wanted something much more immediate and three dimensional.”  He told Speransky that he couldn’t use the design and, in the end, the TD persuaded Shapiro to create his own as he’d done in ’85. 

The director didn’t want to use the mirrors again, as Speransky suggested, because “I thought that they were too showy and that they were too much about me and not enough about the show.  And I’d done them.  I mean, they turned out to be superficial.  I mean, they were a good idea, they were fun, I liked it, everybody liked it, but there was nothing to learn from doing it again.”  So he sat in the theater daily for 10 days and developed a new plan. 

Basically, it involved a couple of simple, wooden moving walls that were constructed like Venetian blinds with slats about four inches wide.  One side was wallpaper and realistic interior detail.  The other side [was] the text of THE JUDGMENT, the Kafka story that the last third of the play is based on.  The idea was that the wall would gradually pull back, scene by scene, to reveal a deeper and deeper stage space until it cut the room into two deep triangles, one for Kafka and one for his father.  By using very specific lighting, one could keep opening and closing the blinds small and precise amounts, revealing different scenes of the father as barely perceptible image, distant memory. or present reality.  For the last third of the play, the walls were transformed into the complete text of THE JUDGMENT so that the action of the play literally takes place within a construct of Kafka’s imagination.

Like the mirrors, the blinds, or jalousies, as they’re known in Europe (including Russia), were an overtly Brechtian device, of which Shapiro said: “The principle [behind the mirrors and the blinds] is physically the same.  The only difference is that the blinds are horizontal and mirrors are vertical but what they’re doing is the same action.  It’s definitely following through the same thought.”  The director, though, liked the Venetian blinds better and he used the same concept—with much less success, as we’ll see—for the 1992 La MaMa revival.

The casting was also a small study in crossed signals.  The director, who had idiosyncratic criteria for casting, recounted that he ended up with two pairs of actors: one with the Father of Rozovsky’s choice and the Son of Shapiro’s, the other with Shapiro’s Father and the playwright’s Son.  As Shapiro described the difference:

His son is . . . this kind of virile Russian leading man.  The son I want is this sort of weirdo gypsy who’s a composer and musician.  He doesn’t play their leading parts.  He’s a beautiful guy.  He isn’t as experienced an actor, but he’s, I don’t know, more sensitive, more frail.

The actors were paired up cross-wise: Shapiro’s Father with Rozovsky’s Son and vice versa.   (The description above of Shapiro’s choice for Kafka, the Son, isn’t so similar to Christopher McCann, the American actor who played the role in 1985, but it sounds remarkably like Michael Preston, who took the part in 1992.) 

The director returned to Moscow in April 1990 to begin rehearsals (in Siberia!) and Shapiro’s Russian-language première of Kafka: Father and Son ran at the Nikitsky Gates Theater (which co-produced) in Moscow in May and June and then went on tour in the USSR and U.S.  The cast was Vladimir Dalinski as the Father and Sergei Erdenko as the Son.  (I have no information about which of the two casts this was—it appears to have been the director’s Father and the playwright’s Son, but I can’t be positive—or what became of the other actors.  If they alternated performances, this was just the pair seen by the Moscow reviewer whose notice I have.)

The only Russian review I have is from the Moscow publication Sovietskaya Kultura [Soviet culture], in which Natalya Kashtanova declared, “The recent audience at the premiere of Franz Kafka: FATHER AND SON at Nikitsky Gates Theater witnessed a strange and alluringly intellectual show.”  Kashtanova seemed particularly to have appreciated the scenic design: “The fantastic shadows on the Venetian blinds [jalousies], the sharply defined light and darkness that separate people one from another, . . . and the sudden[ly] mobile space of the stage all make the performance grotesque and locate it at the junction of the real and the unreal.”  She summed up the production with: “There is an acuteness of the aesthetic perception of life, wherein lies [its] affinity to Kafka.” 

Shapiro was in Russia for five or six weeks, including four weeks of rehearsals; he remained in Moscow for a week or so of performances before leaving for home.  The production proved so successful in Moscow—it was still running at the Nikitsky Gates in 1992—that Rozovsky took it on a tour of Russia.  When Shapiro returned to the U.S. and his artistic residency at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, he arranged for Rozovsky and his troupe to come for a Russian theater festival at the college and present Kafka there in the fall of ’90. 

A year-and-a-half later, in January and February 1992, Shapiro was once again in production for a restaging of Mark Rozovsky’s Kafka: Father and Son at La MaMa, The Shaliko Company’s first show of the year.  Why was Shapiro, who described Kafka as “the most conventional piece we’ve done in a long time,” doing a revival of a two-character, psychological language play instead of his more usual Shaliko production: a physical, socially conscious, politically oriented, multi-cultural theater piece?  Shapiro explained flatly: “After 25 years in the New York theater . . . it’s all we can afford.”  

The Shaliko revival of Kafka opened on 25 January 1992 (after canceling its official opening performance on 23 January) and ran at La MaMa through 8 February.  The music was composed by Marilyn S. Zalkan, the lighting designer was again Blu (who lit the 1985 première), and the costumes were designed by Liz Widulski.  The cast was George Bartenieff, a veteran of the original Living Theatre (The Brig, 1963), as the Father and Michael Preston, who performed as Rakitin with the comic acrobatic and juggling troupe The Flying Karamazov Brothers, as the Son.  Shapiro imported the mise-en-scène, with its movable jalousies, from the 1990 Moscow production, but the acting was developed anew in rehearsal with and for his new cast.  (I attended many rehearsals and performances of this production between 7 January and 6 February.  I also interviewed the actors and some of the other artists.) 

A new element Shapiro added to his second revival of Rozovsky’s play, was music created by Marilyn Zalkan, a new-music composer who also served as the company administrator, based on the electronically sampled speech of the two actors in the production and then manipulated through a digital synthesizer.  Of this work, Zalkan said:

Leo and I decided that what the music was going to be was . . . solely made up of the actors’ voices.  That’s what everything was. . . .  He knows the kind of music that I do outside of theater is very sort of experimental.  I don’t use  any real instrument sounds.  I’ve been doing more and more with taking sounds of voices or whatever—you know, sounds that happen in nature or not nature—and altering them beyond recognition and finding the sort of interior rhythm, interior melodies that come from sounds in general.  That’s sort of what I was working with on Kafka to try to create a sort of tortured, internal, interior, existential feeling. 

Shapiro commonly worked with long rehearsal periods, though the Russian system didn’t permit it with the 1990 Kafka.  Circumstances didn’t, either, for the 1992 remount: the La MaMa revival of Kafka: Father and Son  was rehearsed in four weeks.  As a result, the production wasn’t even technically ready to go before the public on its designated opening night, 23 January, and the official opening had to be postponed for two days. 

The principal problem was the new Venetian blind frames.  The motors running the blinds were very noisy and the carriages Shapiro’s designer built here were so heavy and cumbersome that the movements were awkward and loud.  Shapiro blamed the difficulty on his set builder, who “overbuilt” the contraption—and the lack of money (to replace something that doesn’t work, for instance). 

A more pervasive difficulty, however, affected the outcome of the second La MaMa Kafka.  Shapiro counted on preview performances to hone the audience-performer relationship, the crux of his productions.  “A certain phase of the work starts with the first audience.  I can’t just sort of have it ready in three weeks,” he said.  “I thought I could because I’d done the show before.”  But because a good part of Shapiro’s notion of theater is a shared experience, the actors and spectators can’t share an experience if one participant isn’t there.  He could accomplish a certain amount of preparation for that interplay, but until the cast went before an audience, he couldn’t refine it.  The technical delays resulted in cancelation of the previews so the production opened in front of an audience before Shapiro and his actors had time to work on a relationship with theatergoers. 

Furthermore, Shapiro wasn’t a Stanislavskian; there were no discussions of psychological motivation during rehearsals and the director didn’t let the actors indulge their emotions and then discuss those feelings with them.  Nevertheless, I was surprised to see how conventionally Stanislavskian Shapiro directed his actors: without using the Stanislavskian jargon, he referred to objective, subtext, and urgency.  On one of the last rehearsals I watched, I noted that, though there was “[s]ome imposition of stylization ,” for the most part, the “[a]cting is pretty Stanislavskian (i.e., psychological realism).”  But then when I returned for the first public performance, I recorded: the “performance was very stylized—where and when did it come from?”  (I learned later that Shapiro habitually did this kind of style work during tech rehearsals at the very end of the rehearsal period, which I hadn’t attended.) 

Without previews, the production wasn’t ready by opening night.  The audience, including Jonathan Kalb of the Village Voice, was turned away.  Even by 25 January, some technical problems still had not been solved and the audience had to wait about fifteen minutes in La MaMa’s small lobby.  The performance, itself, was marred by technical glitches and actors not yet fully comfortable with their performances.  The critics, predictably, were not kind.  Wilborn Hampton, for instance, wrote in the Times, the first paper to publish a Kafka review, four days after the delayed opening: “Mr. Rozovsky has not written a play so much as stitched together a patchwork of simulated dramatizations based on Kafka’s epistolary and fictional indictment of his father.  For some reason, both Mr. Rozovsky and his director, Leonardo Shapiro, felt it necessary to embroider on the original.”  Hampton continued his disapproval: “Apart from such expansions on the author’s reminiscences, Mr. Rozovsky cannot resist the compulsion to pad out Kafka’s words with dialogue of his own.  The result is a pair of characters who often sound more like refugees from a Beckett play than a Kafka story.”  The Times reviewer added that “a major interpretive problem with ‘Kafka’ is its narrow view that the ‘Letter’ is little more than a monochromatic portrait of child abuse and that there is a political subtext beneath Kafka’s celebrated conflict with his father.  Kafka himself dismissed the former, and while one might read Kafka’s epistle as a ‘Letter to God,’ it should never be mistaken for a ‘Letter to the Commissar.’”  Hampton also dismissed the acting: “Michael Preston as Kafka and George Bartenieff as his father strive to turn all this into drama.  At a recent performance, they also had to contend with a host of technical problems that, among other things, brought the house lights up at odd moments in several scenes.”  In the end, Hampton didn’t have one positive word to say about the production.

Less than a week later, Jonathan Kalb of the Village Voice, who had been turned away from that canceled opening but was in the house on the 25th, referred to himself in the third person as “K.” in a review entitled “A Trial.”  He exaggerated the delay (“an eternity”), the weather (“The city outside was deep in snow”) and the temperature (“the frostbitten crowd”) to emphasize his displeasure.  Kalb described the play as a “response to totalitarian circumstances that no longer exist” and disparaged its “relevance and timeliness in post-glasnost Amerika [sic],” overlooking the ubiquitous examples of the suppression, even in the late-20th-century United States, of ideas both political (the party machinations during the 1992 presidential primaries to remove candidates from the ballot) and artistic (the congressional attacks on the NEA in 1989 and 1990 and the NEA’s introduction of the 1989 anti-obscenity “loyalty oath”). 

(I wonder what the Voice writer would have thought 23 years ago if he’d foreseen the arrival of Putin on the geopolitical scene.  Indeed, hadn’t he heard of repressive leaders even then in power, such as Fidel Castro of Cuba, Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, Saddam Hussein of Iraq, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei of Iran, Jiang Zemin of the People’s Republic of China, Hafez al-Assad of Syria, Kim Il-sung of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia, Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, or Moammar Ghaddafi of Libya?  Some of these have left the scene since 1992 and others, like Putin, have come along, but even in liberal democracies, ideas have been seen to be suppressed—even in the 21st century.) 

In addition, Shapiro argued that the repression he was investigating in Kafka was, in part, self-repression; he saw the father as “a voice inside the son.”  While it is certainly not Kalb’s fault if the production did not successfully communicate this aspect of the play, Shapiro would undoubtedly have said that the critic had failed to make “the connection between events . . . that are hidden . . . by the official reality” that the Soviet Union represented the repression of ideas and with its demise, freedom of thought is no longer an issue. 

The Voice reviewer filled out his column with put-downs and quips by his alter ego, the bewildered victim of Kafka’s “The Trial,” but just reading his press packet before the performance began left him “filled with nebulous anxieties.”  He went on at some length:

For the next 80 minutes, K. watched and listened as this [famous] author was bleached of his celebrated weirdness and turned into a plain, pouty adolescent, his unhappy, paranoid, and strangely fruitful relationship to his father reduced to a distended round of kvetching, cobbled together from posthumously published writings. 

The Voice writer catalogued a host of directorial effects and technical problems which Kalb declared “led K. to the point of distraction.”  Kalb revealed that “he had been summoned to this play in order to talk about it afterward, but as it went on he began to feel more and more dull-witted.”  Kalb summed up his experience with “his last thoughts before losing consciousness”: “So much effort to rescue a dated, dreary, chatty script with directorial stunts and then bungled stunts . . . .”  Again, not a positive word appeared in the entire notice, calculated not just to be a pan, but to be dismissive and insulting.

The Kafka later audiences saw, however, was quite different from that first night.  The actor-spectator interplay didn’t develop, for instance, until the second week of performances (the time the cancelled previews would have run).  Nuances in both the acting and stage business had been added and unproductive things removed.  The psychical distance between the performers and the audience was closed later in the run, and audiences at the last performances were visibly affected by the encounter.  Reviews based on later performances described a more engaging experience.  Three more notices came out in February and March, all from limited-circulation periodicals.  First out was the Jewish Week, in which Paul Kresh described the “stormy two-actor drama” as a “fairly exciting evening in the theater, especially in the ingenious new production Shapiro has devised.”  Citing one of Kafka’s “main themes” about “the futility of trying to understand the ways of God,” just trying to “submit and obey His laws,” Kresh asserted that “this play . . . becomes at the same time a brooding drama about God the Father and man the son.”  He continued, “All this could have been staged as a series of conversations in conventional settings but Shapiro has ventured instead to do something more daring, to pitch the two protagonists in startling juxtapositions from constantly mobile orbits.”  While caviling that Kafka “does tend to drag,” Kresh described his experience as “electrifying,” even if it’s “at times slightly tedious by virtue of its very intensity.”  The reviewer observed that the actors “tear at each other in impassioned tantrums; then again, . . . whisper, murmur or mutter in acting performances shaped to approach the condition of music” in a play that’s “shrewdly scripted, stunningly acted and directed, and brilliantly staged.”

Next to publish was Henry Popkin in the Forward, the weekly English edition of the century-old Yiddish Forverts, who pronounced Kafka: Father and Son “not up to the level of ‘[Strider:] The Story of a Horse.’”  Comparing Rozovsky’s play with the original source material, the review-writer commented on what’s in the story and the letter that Kafka doesn’t include.  Popkin also recounted other anecdotes he’d heard about the writer, including one of an encounter on the street between Kafka and his father that ends with a riposte in which Kafka remarks “that love sometimes wears a forbidding image” and the Forward reviewer responded, “I find that incident more moving and more telling than anything in the play.”  Popkin’s final analysis of Kafka was:

Most of the speech on stage is evidently intended to be the equivalent of the words that might have been spoken  between father and son in ‘Letter to His Father.’  It is not.  The two actors . . . are more than adequate to the stylized demands of this play about a tyrant and his victim.  To make their actions more theatrical, Mr. Shapiro arbitrarily shifts them from one playing area to another and startles us with changes in the lighting, not always to good effect.

Finally, John Bell in TheatreWeek, citing “an extraordinary piece of theater, with two fine actors, . . . a fascinating script . . ., and a splendid production . . .,” wrote on 24 February, two weeks after closing, that the “father/son duel goes on like two good boxers for eight rounds,” and that the actors “show the [father-son] bond to be too complicated for easy resolution.”  Continued Bell, “Shapiro’s set is an apparently simple turn of the century interior which turns out to be capable of surprising transformation. . . .  The set is a marvel, in part because it works so harmoniously with the actors and the texts.”  As for the performances, the TW writer declared, “Best of all are the actors, who seize their roles with a kind of expressionist passion.”  It was a glowing review . . . and came too late (and in a package too small) to benefit Shaliko or the production. 

I don’t know if Rozovsky is still presenting Kafka: Father and Son, but he’s still running the Nikitsky Gates.  (Russian theaters tend to keep successful or important plays in their repertoires for years—even decades, remarked Shapiro: “The Moscow Art Theater still has The Bluebird that Stanislavski directed in rep.  That show must be 100 years old.”)  The text is published, but I don’t know how easy it would be to locate: Kafka, Father and Son: A One-act Play for Two Actors, Based on Franz Kafka’s “Letter to His Father” and “The Judgment” ([Scarsdale, NY:] Theatre Research Associates, 1982).

Shaliko’s 'Kafka: Father and Son,' Part 1

[In July, I saw the Lincoln Center Festival presentation of Yukio Ninagawa’s stage version of Kafka on the Shore, an adaptation of a novel by Haruki Murakami.  Though neither the book nor the play were strictly about the Czech author Franz Kafka (1883-1924), the self-named central character said Kafka was his favorite writer and Murakami is heavily influenced by the Czech’s work.  Back in the early ’90s, I was doing a profile of the stage director Leonardo Shapiro and his experimental Shaliko Company that required me to shadow him while he worked.  At the time, one of Shaliko’s productions in rehearsal was a revival of Kafka: Father and Son, a Russian play by Mark Rozovsky (Strider, 1979-80) which Shapiro had directed twice previously, including both the world première at the La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club (1985) and the Russian-language première in Moscow (1990).  It seems a propitious time to put together a discussion of these productions as a sort of off-center follow-up to my report on Kafka on the Shore (on ROT on 11 September).  This article is assembled from my original notes at the time, interviews with Shapiro and some of his colleagues and associates, the reviews of the three stagings, and sections of a long profile of Shapiro and Shaliko (an expansion of a Drama Review article, “Shapiro and Shaliko: Techniques of Testimony,” Winter 1993).]

BACKGROUND & HISTORY

In March 1984, Leonardo Shapiro, founder and artistic director of the 12-year-old Shaliko Company, and Shapiro’s new partner for the third and last Shaliko Company, Elena Prischepenko, whose stage name was Elena (or Helen) Nicholas, had gone to Russia on a three-week theater tour with a group of theater professionals under the auspices of the Citizens’ Exchange Council.  The group, organized by Prischepenko, included director Peter Sellars, Quaigh Theatre artistic director Will Lieberson, and about 15 other writers, directors, and academics.  The tour spent two weeks in Moscow and one in Leningrad and at the Soviet writers’ union, Shapiro made “a rather intemperate . . . speech” about seeing so many plays in Moscow with “happy endings.”  He asked the assembled playwrights why they didn’t “have the courage to talk about life as it really was.”  According to Shapiro, after the session, Mark Rozovsky told him, “I have play, no happy ending, you want?”  They arranged to meet secretly and the playwright turned over the manuscript of Kafka: Father and Son, “[j]ust like . . . a spy novel.”  Rozovsky had workshopped Kafka, based mostly on a 100-page letter Franz Kafka wrote, but never sent, to his father (“Letter to His Father,” November 1919) and parts of “The Judgment” (1912), Kafka’s most autobiographical tale, at the Moscow Art Theater Studio around 1983, but Soviet Premier Yuri Andropov’s Minister of Culture, Pyotr Demichev, cancelled the performances after the second preview, apparently because of the implied scrutiny of authority and repression, so it never officially opened. 

Shapiro and Prischepenko smuggled the manuscript out of the U.S.S.R. in their suitcases, and Prischepenko translated it when they got back to the United States.  In March 1985, following a non-Shaliko directing gig, Shapiro presented the world première of Kafka at La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club in New York’s East Village in an attempt to relaunch Shaliko, which had been disbanded twice, as a company.  He would do the play twice more after its 1985 début: its Russian-language première in 1990, after glasnost was initiated by Mikhail Gorbachev, at Rozovsky’s own Nikitsky Gates Theater in Moscow and on tour in both the Soviet Union and the United States; and a New York revival, also at La MaMa, in 1992, after the Soviet Union collapsed.    

Rozovsky’s Kafka is a two-character play (there’s a non-speaking appearance of a woman who wasn’t even credited in the Shaliko programs) that’s essentially a debate between writer Franz Kafka and his domineering father, Hermann.  There’s little plot to synopsize—the play ran an hour in its 1985 première and 80 minutes in 1992—but a lot happens; here’s the outline as described by The Nation reviewer Paul Berman in ’85:

In fact the play is strictly psychological.  We see Kafka, 36, quarreling with his elderly father.  Son is thinking of [not] getting married.  Doubts and terrors plague him.  There’s much to discuss.

So they talk, which is to say, spend an evening knifing each other with truths.  Father has always loomed like a giant in Son’s eyes and has crushed him with his giant’s power and insensitivity.  So Son declares, and we believe him.  Father replies that power and insensitivity are the stuff of life.  Father is crude, simple, joyful.  That is equally believable.  Father complains that endless accusations from Son have weighed him down, that it has been terrible to receive nothing but blame.  Son is a parasite; he sucks his father’s blood.  This, too, we accept.  And Son replies that Father is still a giant—for these paternal accusations are undeniably just and utterly devastating and they have crushed Son once again.  True!

For most viewers, the play is about the relationship between the Son and the Father, which one reviewer described as “the classical Oedipal struggle,” though it’s more complex than that.  It appears realistic at first because of the details Rozovsky provides, but it’s not—at least in Shapiro’s mounting.  The Father, for instance descends from the height of his strength to abject senility in less than an hour, promoting the interpretation that the events are probably occurring in the Son’s mind and that the Father of the play is a creation of the Son’s imagination.  The director insisted that both actors represented the same “character” and that, in fact, “[t]he father is a voice inside the son.”  Nor is Kafka a sentimental or romantic portrait of the writer as a narcissistic, eternally suffering artist.  Both men are monsters in their own ways—the Son a master of passive aggressiveness and the Father, a self-righteous bully—and neither is especially likable.  Rozovsky’s play, in Shapiro’s presentation, becomes increasingly ominous and illusory as it progresses. 

But art and artists were fundamentally political for Shapiro.  He viewed Kafka: Father and Son as “another exploration of social creativity and repression through the autobiographical lens of the misfit artist . . . .”  (Shaliko’s The Yellow House, about Vincent van Gogh, was a variation on this theme as well.)  The Shaliko Company’s 1992 program for Kafka included a statement from Shapiro clearly affirming that the play was, among other things, “a warning about the new wave of repression of the creative spirit building here in the United States.”   In an interview with Shapiro, Rozovsky described this idea of the artist as rebel and political bellwether. Comparing himself to Franz Kafka, Rozovsky said:

[T]he only way of surviving those [pre-glasnost] years was to write “for the desk drawer,” to write for the salvation of one’s own identity, as Kafka did, and be free only in art.  And this gave rise to a paradox: a blank sheet of paper, a pen, ink, a table and a chair, nothing more, and that is me.  But out there is a huge world, a colossal bureaucratic machine, the army with its tanks and rockets, the navy with its aircraft carriers, the Ministry of Culture, and thousands, tens and hundreds of thousands, millions of people in the service and in the pay of the system.  And only one man stands up against that system, one man with a pen and blank sheets of paper.  And his only act is, from morning to night, from left to right, writing his manuscript.

Kafka knew that “the world around him was unjust and harsh,” asserted the playwright, so his art became his only outlet for his freedom.  He also knew that, like Rozovsky himself and another dissident Soviet author, Alexandr Solzhenitsyn (The Gulag Archipelago, 1973), “one man holding a pen in his hand, was mightier than the whole world with its army of millions and its bureaucracy of millions.”  The Czech writer “had a lot of insight into the world of fascism and ‘socialism,’” observed Rozovsky.  “The only other writer who has such insight into our times, Dostoyevsky [Crime and Punishment, 1866; The Brothers Karamazov, 1880].”  The Russian playwright confessed that Kafka’s “way of life had become my way of life.”

Mark Grigorievich Rozovsky was born in Petropavlovsk on Russia’s far-eastern Kamchatka Peninsula on 3 April 1937.  Both his parents were engineers, but his father, an old-school Leninist, was arrested in a Stalinist purge in October when Mark was only a few months old.  (The persecution may have had something to do with the family’s Jewish background.  Mark’s father was Jewish and his mother was half Greek and half Russian.  This fact would return to plague Rozovsky as a young adult in the anti-Semitic Soviet Union.)  Originally sentenced to death, the older Rozovsky’s sentence was commuted to ten years due to personnel changes in Stalin’s government.  The inmate’s wife visited the prison to bring her husband bread, until she, too, was arrested—for “giving aid to the enemy of the people.”  While his parents were incarcerated, Mark Rozovsky lived with his grandmother in a town that was subject to German bombing and strafing during the Nazi assault on the Soviet Union, and young Mark was wounded in the leg despite his grandmother’s efforts to protect him. 

In 1947, Mark Rozovsky finally got to know his father and the family moved to Moscow, where they lived in the basement of a vermin-infested building with 83 others who all shared one toilet and a single sink with running water for both their collective bathroom and kitchen use.  During those post-war years, Rozovsky suffered the losses of both his grandmother and his father. 

The incipient playwright studied journalism at Moscow State University, but in 1958, he started Nash Dom (Our House), a student theater troupe, and devoted his time at MSU to running it.  Very popular, Nash Dom launched the careers of many of the Soviet Union’s best known actors and directors.  He went on to work at the Moscow Art Theater and the Bolshoi (Great) Drama Theater in Leningrad.  In the 1960s, Rozovsky conceived the notion to write a play based on a Leo Tolstoy story, “Kholstomer” (“Strider,” 1886) which eventually became Strider: The Story of a Horse.  The Rozovsky adaptation, a play with music, débuted at the Gorky Theater in Leningrad in 1975 and then was staged in New York (Off-Broadway, 1979; Broadway, 1979-80).  That same year, Rozovsky directed the Soviet Union’s first rock musical, Opheus and Eurydice.  In 1983, Rozovsky opened his own theater, the Nikitsky Gates, even while Soviet censorship kept watch over the repertoire until glasnost was established.  Though Rozovsky was himself accepted as a prominent member of the Soviet theater community as an artist, working as a guest director at other companies such as the MAT, the Nikitsky Gates was a “studio” theater, operating without a license or government funding.  (The company’s status may have been upgraded to “official” after 1990, or the distinction may have disappeared after the Soviet Union dissolved.)

Rozovsky’s theater has always been politically oriented, and that tendency plus his Jewish roots kept him under the constant scrutiny of the Soviet state.  He liked to poke the Russian bear, and was not infrequently called to account.  As early as Nash Dom in the 1950s, which was co-directed by two other Jewish students, he was summoned to the office of a local Communist Party chief who asked him why, in one of the troupe’s productions, a character was on stage holding a yellow folder.  The young director must know, the CPSU official demanded, that yellow was the national color of the Jews.  (The folder had been taken at random from the theater’s prop room, but Rozovsky decided to take a stand—theatrically, of course.  He yelled and cursed and played the wild-eyed artist, totally intimidating the unprepared bureaucrat who retreated—and the yellow folder stayed in the show.)  Nash Dom was shuttered in 1969 and the young director was blacklisted.  A friend who worked in television told him that his name was on a list of people banned from appearing on air.  Instead of emigrating, as many of his Jewish contemporaries had (using their backgrounds to enter Israel), he stayed in the Soviet Union.  He got personal connections to help him mount productions in Leningrad and Riga, Latvia, and his shows received critical acclaim.  Rozovsky found himself back on the road to recognition.  Even now, with Russia no longer a communist state (though in Vladimir Putin’s Russia, there’s still a tacit form of censorship and the persecution of dissidents is common), Rozovsky and the Nikitsky Gates Theater regularly provoke both the establishment and the public.  Shapiro was convinced “that in Rozovsky’s mind [Kafka] had to do with the government and the artist.”  He added, “And I think the government’s mind, too.”

(Beginning in March 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev, newly-elected General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, launched a policy of glasnost—‘openness,’ ‘transparency’—that provided public access to information after almost seven decades of state censorship.  It was just prior to this act that Shapiro and Prischepenko made their journey to Moscow, brought the script of Kafka: Father and Son out, and produced the first Shaliko production.  In March 1990, Gorbachev was elected President of the Soviet Union but on 8 December 1991, the presidents of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus signed the Belavezha Accords dissolving the Soviet Union.  The Moscow première of Rozovsky’s play was presented during the final year of the USSR’s existence.  On 25 December 1991, Gorbachev resigned the presidency of the USSR and yielded his authority to Boris Yeltsin as president of Russia.  The last Shaliko staging of Kafka occurred after the dissolution of the Soviet Union.).

Rozovsky didn’t recall exactly when he wrote Kafka—sometime in 1980 or maybe 1981, he guessed— but the idea was generated as far back as the 1960s.  That was when the first book by Franz Kafka was published in the Soviet Union, and the German-speaking, Jewish Czech writer became the center of an intellectual fad that lasted for about a decade.  Furthermore, the brief blossoming of the Prague Spring in 1968 (which, coincidentally, had also given Gorbachev the initial concept for glasnost) became identified with Kafka’s writings.  Rozovsky said he’d wanted to write a play about the Czech author, who “continued to be the writer on whom our freedom and spirituality were tested,” because “those times remain important to me.”  The Russian dramatist found an inviting theme in Kafka’s writing when he saw that “Kafka loved life, and his works are life affirming.  The morbid nature of his work and his inner depression,” Rozovsky maintained, ”are a means of doing battle for his love of life.” 

He first contemplated basing a play on “The Trial” (1925), which Rozovsky felt “was similar to what our history was covering up.”  But the playwright reconsidered because the story of K, a man arrested and tried for a crime whose nature neither he nor we ever learn, “reflected that history too clearly.”  (Rozovsky doesn’t say directly, but I suspect that only part of his reluctance to use “The Trial” was artistic.  Another part was likely his presumption that any play that obviously and directly characterized or criticized the Soviet administration would be banned and, at a minimum, jeopardize the author’s freedom.)  So he reread Kafka’s stories and the “Letter to His Father,” and “it seemed to me that these two things could be joined together, making a more profound, more indirect work.” 

Leo Richard Shapiro was born on 7 January 1946 in St. Paul, Minnesota.  Family problems, which Leo and his mother, Florence, blamed on Irving Shapiro’s selfish, domineering, and unfaithful nature, ended his parents’ marriage in divorce in 1951.  Florence Shapiro took her sons, Leo and his older brother Gary, to Miami, Florida, when Leo was 5½.  Shapiro’s strained relationship with his father, who visited Miami periodically, caused great emotional and psychological stress and Shapiro had trouble in school and ended up with a bleeding ulcer before he was 14. 

In 1960, Leo was enrolled in the Windsor Mountain School in Lenox, Massachusetts, where he flourished in an atmosphere free of rules and administrative repression (see my article on “Max and Gertrud Bondy,” 12 October 2011).  He hitchhiked to New York City on weekends where he began seeing Off-Off-Broadway theater in Greenwich Village (see “Greenwich Village Theater in the 1960s,” 12 and 15 December 2011).  Formerly a budding poet, Shapiro had begun to shift his focus to theater at Windsor Mountain, but this new theater, with its political and social conscience and the European influences, being presented by innovative and experimental artists and companies, clinched the change.  It was also during his three years at Windsor Mountain that Leo Richard Shapiro became Leonardo Shapiro.

Already politically active with the anti-war, civil rights, and anti-nuke movements, Shapiro participated in many demonstrations, protests, and marches both in New York and beyond.  He began hanging around the Living Theater because the 1962 General Strike for Peace was headquartered there and the theater of Julian Beck and Judith Malina showed the neophyte that the stage and politics could be combined.  His political activism also got him arrested not a few times, both as a teenager (his first arrest for political activity came in 1959, at age 13) and as an adult (his last roust was in 1992 in New York at 46). 

After graduating from Windsor Mountain in 1963, Shapiro hopscotched among a couple of colleges, always participating in the schools’ theater activities, until, in 1966, he started at New York University’s year-old School of the Arts (now the Tisch School of the Arts) as a directing student.  In 1967, while still a student, he and a handful of schoolmates launched what became the New York Free Theater, a leftist street-theater troupe (see my blog post of 4 April 2010).  That same year, the young director was also introduced to one of his major theatrical inspirations when he participated in theater innovator and theorist Jerzy Grotowski’s first U.S. workshop, an experience that influenced the rest of Shapiro’s professional life.  (His other principal inspiration was Bertolt Brecht and his art would always be an attempt to synthesize the ideas of these two theoretical giants.) 

In the summer of 1969, upon finishing NYU, Shapiro headed to California, but he stopped in Taos, New Mexico, and ended up staying for almost two years, forming the Appleseed Circus, a guerrilla theater troupe that performed all over the Four Corners (see my articles “Song in the Blood (Hiroshima/Los Alamos),” 5 August 2009, and “Cheerleaders of the Revolution,” 31 October 2009).  Shapiro experienced a reinvigoration of his fascination with American Indian culture, performance, and religion that he had begun as a boy.  (His company was named for a Zuni Pueblo deity and ceremonial rite, on which I posted “‘May You Be Blessed With Light’: The Zuni Shalako Rite,” 22 October 2010.) 

The Appleseed Circus dissolved in the fall of 1971 and Shapiro returned to New York City.  He formed The Shaliko Company in 1972 and they presented Children of the Gods, a collage of Greek tragedies, at a 1973 NYU showcase.  Joseph Papp, the founder of the New York Shakespeare Festival (now called the Joseph Papp Public Theater), saw a performance and immediately invited Shapiro and his company to work at the Public, where Shaliko resided until 1976 when Shapiro disbanded it.  Shapiro turned to teaching and free-lance directing until Papp fired him in 1977 over a dispute about a musicalization Shapiro conceived of Molière’s The Misanthrope.  Shapiro never got over what he saw as a betrayal by his mentor and surrogate father and the two men never reconciled before Papp died in 1991.  (Irving Shapiro had died in 1974.)

Shapiro re-formed Shaliko in 1981, but it lasted only a single season.  In 1983, after returning to the ranks of free-lance directors, he and Elena Prischepenko launched the third and last Shaliko incarnation at La MaMa E. T. C., beginning the company’s association with Ellen Stewart (see my blog profile, “The Pushcart Theater: Ellen Stewart (1919-2011),” 4 April 2011).  The first Shaliko staging of Kafka: Father and Son followed in 1985.  During this period, Shapiro and his company produced their most ambitious and impressive works, created collectively by the company, including The Yellow House (the first Shaliko show I saw), 1986, and 1990’s Strangers (about which I posted “Shaliko’s Strangers” on 3 and 6 March 2014). 

Following the revival of Rozovsky’s play in 1992, Shapiro directed his final New York production, Blue Heaven by Karen Malpede (retitled Going to Iraq afterwards) at Theater for the New City.  A bitter dispute with the playwright resulted in Shapiro’s firing and he decided to accelerate his plans to retire to New Mexico.  In May 1993, he disbanded the last Shaliko Company and in June, he moved to the tiny town of Chamisal, New Mexico, south of Taos, to live in a house he and his son had built in the sacred Sangre de Cristo mountains.  He was diagnosed with terminal bladder cancer in June 1995; nevertheless, the director took on a production of Chekhov’s The Seagull, a play that meant a great deal to him, with a company of young actors from Albuquerque.  The play was performed there in September 1996 and in November, the company brought it to the Theatre Project in Baltimore—where Shaliko had given its first performances in 1973.  The director was too ill to make the journey east, and Leonardo Shapiro died on 22 January 1997 at barely 51.

The America director saw Kafka as “a Jewish family play, a play about fathers and sons.”  It was, he averred, his “most overtly personal piece” and he remarked, “In rehearsal, I find that I am dramatizing my own life.”  Shapiro, indeed, felt a connection among his father; Joseph Papp, the Public Theater impresario who’d been a surrogate father in the director’s early years; and Hermann Kafka, but the connection to Irving Shapiro was more pervasive even than that.  “The play struck a very deep chord in me,” Shapiro admitted.  “It spoke to me immediately about my own childhood and my own difficult relationship with my father.”  Everything in the production—the sets, costumes, props, images—was drawn from his childhood “encounters” with his father.   Shapiro revealed that for him, the play “is about child abuse and the ways in which we internalize this repression of it and support it.”  One of the recurrent themes of Shaliko productions, and a focus of Shapiro’s stretching back to his guerrilla theater days in the 1960s and ’70s, was the “sacrifice of children.”  This theme appeared both literally, as in Children of the Gods, Shaliko’s very first production which was a compilation of Greek classics that included the sacrifice scene from Iphigenia in Aulis, and Punch!, based on the Punch and Judy shows in which Punch throws his baby out a window, and figuratively, as in Kafka: Father and Son; The Yellow House, in which Shapiro saw the artist as a child of society who was sacrificed; or The Seagull, the director’s last production, in which Arkadina derides her son Treplyev.  This focus sprang from Shapiro’s own experience first as a son alienated from his biological father, then as a protégé spurned by his theatrical mentor, Joseph Papp.  His own memoirs attest to his full understanding of the damage and pain caused by a distant and abusive father.  

“What was interesting to me about this play,” explained Shapiro, “was not the surface reality of two men having a conversation, but the interior reality of Kafka’s memory and imagination.  The effect on him of the pressures of his family, especially his father, and the eventual leap of the imagination he made to create a world of his own.”  Beside the theme of sacrificing children was a second focus for the director, the place of the artist in society.  In many of his productions, the central figure struggles with the creation of a work of art: just as Kafka writes “The Judgment” in Kafka: Father and Son, in The Yellow House, van Gogh paints his Self-Portrait and Starry Night; Aria, a sculptor in Blue Heaven modeled on environmental artist Ana Mendieta, fights a creative block; and in Chekhov’s The Seagull, a play in part about art and artists, Treplyev stages a play he’s written.  (In Runaway Sam in the Promised Land, an autobiographical teleplay Shapiro wrote in retirement shortly before his death, the character Max, the stand-in for the director, is a sculptor who “makes weird statues” which he displays on the streets, refuses to make anything saleable.  People on the streets where Max puts his art “just trash it or take it away.  People don’t want to see that stuff in their neighborhood.”) 

[“Shaliko’s Kafka: Father and Son, Part 1,” has covered the play’s development and background and the bios of both playwright Mark Rozovsky and director Leonardo Shapiro.  In a few days, I’ll post a production-by-production description of each of Shapiro’s three stagings of Kafka: Father and Son with a round-up of the critical reception in 1985, 1990, and 1992.  Please log onto ROT again and read the rest of this history.  ~Rick]