A Biography of Leonardo Shapiro, Part 5

 

[“A Biography of Leonardo Shapiro, Part 5” begins with Shaliko’s last production at the Public Theater and the last show of the original company before Shapiro re-formed it five years later.  It continues with the director’s foray into freelancing—which eventually led to his devastating split with Joseph Papp and his contentious departure from the Public. 

[As you’ll read, Shapiro restarted Shaliko briefly, failed, and then tried again, forging his enduring association with the legendary Ellen Stewart and the La MaMa E.T.C.

[A trip to the Soviet Union introduced Shapiro to Russian playwright and director Mark Rozovsky, whose play Kafka: Father and Son became so meaningful to the American theater man that he staged it three times. 

[The last incarnation of The Shaliko Company moved into Shapiro’s period of “Original Collaborative Work” and the première of the company’s most audience-pleasing production, The Yellow House.  (It was this production that introduced me to Shapiro and Shaliko’s work.)

[As I’ve been saying since Part 2 of this bio series, I admonish readers who are just joining this look at Leonardo Shapiro’s personal history to go back to the beginning and read the first four parts before trying to make sense of Part 5.  Parts 1 through 4 were posted on 16, 19, 22, and 25 April.]

Georg Büchner’s 1837 play, Woyzeck, produced at the Public in 1976 with Joseph Chaikin in the title role, was the last Shaliko play affiliated with the New York Shakespeare Festival (see “Woyzeck (The Shaliko Company, 1976),” 11 and 14 July 2020). 

Shapiro said he chose Woyzeck because he was looking for a play to do with Chaikin, whom the founder of Shaliko had known since his teens when he hung out at the Living Theatre, of which Chaikin had been a member, and with whom Shapiro had participated in workshops with Grotowski in Poland in 1975.  

They agreed that Büchner’s (1813-37) anti-heroic soldier would be a good vehicle for the actor.  The resemblance between the characters of Franz Woyzeck and Galy Gay in Brecht’s Man Is Man, for which Chaikin had won an Obie in 1963 (and which Shapiro had seen), shouldn’t be overlooked as a force in this selection, however. 

Woyzeck was a co-production with Chaikin’s Other Theatre, his successor to the Open Theatre, which disbanded in 1973.  (The Other Theatre was co-founded in 1975 with playwright Jean-Claude van Itallie [1936-2021].  In 1974, Chaikin had co-formed the Working Theater with Peter Kass and Kristin Linklater [1936-2020].)

Shapiro said Woyzeck was the company’s “most normal show,” all planned in advance because the cast included non-company members.  The production, which Shapiro characterized as “a prophetic vision of the devaluation of Man in the modern world,” nonetheless illustrated a recurring Shaliko theme: the lot of the common man.

The production earned widely divergent reviews, but critics generally either loved it or hated it.  Most critics who didn’t like the production invoked, as they had with Ghosts, Shapiro’s violation of the 19th-century values of the play.  Other critics had high praise for the show.  Harold Clurman (1901-80) of The Nation, for instance, concluded that “the production registers; one remembers it.”  

Yet, it wasn’t the critics who drove Shapiro from the Public Theater but his mentor, Joseph Papp.  Two Shaliko actors about whom Shapiro cared most had left the company following Woyzeck and Shapiro disbanded it. 

He decided to try his hand at freelance directing.  As a young director, Shapiro had hired out to the NYU School of the Arts in 1972 to stage The Women at the Tomb by Michel de Ghelderode (Belgian [Flemish]; 1898-1962) with a student cast.  The performances were mounted at the school’s studio space at 111 Second Avenue in the East Village from 8 to 10 May.

So in December 1976, the nascent freelancer started out his independent directing stint with the première of The Youth Hostel at the Public Theater, part of a workshop of three one-act plays by Wallace Shawn.  (The three plays, which are set before, during, and after sex respectively, were presented at the Public as Three Short Plays.  The first and third plays on the bill were Summer Evening, directed by Wilford Leach [1929-88] and Mr. Frivolous, directed by Lee Breuer [1937-2021].)

The 45-minute-long play by itself would be no more than a footnote in Shapiro’s career—except for two points: it cemented the life-long friendship with Shawn the director had had since NYU and it was his entrée as an independent director at the New York Shakespeare Festival.  These both led directly to the abortive directorship of the musicalized Misanthrope in 1977 which generated the rift with Joseph Papp that haunted Shapiro the rest of his life. 

It had been Shawn who convinced Papp to hire Shapiro for Youth Hostel by affirming his belief in his young friend after the director had left the Public Theater the previous year.  It had also been Shawn who brokered the original connection between The Shaliko Company and the New York Shakespeare Festival.  Later, as we’ll see, Shawn brought Shapiro the script of Andrea Dunbar’s The Arbor from London.

Then from 13 to 29 May 1977, the Working Theater presented coo-me-doo, or they’re only made of clay under Shapiro’s direction.  A song-and-dance collage of love imagery (from Chaucer to Ginsberg) conceived by Kristin Linklater, co-founder of the troupe with Peter Kass and Joseph Chaikin.  The piece ran in the company’s Off-Off-Broadway space on West 12th Street in the far west Village.

Some years before staging The Youth Hostel, Shapiro had conceived a musical version of Molière’s (French; 1622 [baptized]-1673) Misanthrope with Shaliko but let the project drop.  The composer, Margaret Pine, one of Shaliko’s original members, had continued to develop the play, and, Shapiro reported, brought it back to the director who convinced Papp to produce it (see “The Misanthrope – The Musical,” 21 June 2021). 

Eventually, Papp and Shapiro argued over the timbre of the production.  Shapiro refused to make changes in the production as Papp demanded, he said, and the impresario fired him after the preview on 6 October 1977. 

Needless to say, the view from the other side is a little different than Shapiro’s own.  From the beginning, apparently, Richard Wilbur (1921-2017), whose verse translation formed the book and lyrics of the musical, expressed reservations about Shapiro’s suitability to direct the production.  Wilbur’s agent, Gilbert Parker (1927-2019), recommended J Ranelli (1938-2019), another of his clients, to Papp, but the Shakespeare Festival remained initially loyal to Shapiro. 

Reports of difficulties in the production reached Papp’s office toward the end of the rehearsal period and the producer began to feel that Shapiro “could not handle” the musical adaptation and that what he and Pine had developed “worked badly.” 

By this time, Papp had also become aware that some cast members were “so discouraged” that they wanted to leave but Papp persuaded them to stay “in the hope that with a new stage director and a fresh viewpoint, the project could be saved.”

After Wilbur and Parker saw the second preview of Misanthrope on 5 October, they “urged” Papp to replace Shapiro “to move the production away from the disastrous course it was taking.”  Wilbur ultimately demanded that his name be removed from all references to the production.

(The New York Shakespeare Festival went on to produce The Misanthrope at the Public’s Anspacher Theater between 4 October and 27 November 1977 with another director, Bill Gile [1942-2011], credited with the staging.  An additional composer and orchestrator were also brought in to “enhance” the score but the show received disastrous reviews and closed with little fanfare.) 

The association with Papp ended acrimoniously, and Shapiro’s departure from the Public Theater left wounds that remained tender.  “I spent, like, two years sulking after that,” said Shapiro.   Even years later, Shapiro recalled the Misanthrope episode bitterly.

Shapiro had very conflicted feelings about his relationship with Joseph Papp.  Twenty years after the event, he would say, “Joe was a very strong force in my life. . . . .  You know, he was like a father.  To me, he was like a bad father so it’s like a big deal.” 

The root of the young director’s problem, he learned, was that “I have problems with authority, and I have had problems with producers . . . .  I want what I want, and I resent not getting it.”  The issue had already appeared in his first professional directing job, Yes Yes, No No, and it would surface again later in the failure of his work on Karen Malpede’s (b. 1945) Blue Heaven and his difficulties with the Trinity/La MaMa Performing Arts Program. 

(I interviewed Malpede twice, once in February 1992 as part of my work on the TDR profile of Shapiro and again on 17 July 1992 for Studies in American Drama, 1945-Present [“An Interview with Karen Malpede,” 8.1 (1993)]; republished as “Karen Malpede” in Speaking on Stage: Interviews with Contemporary American Playwrights, edited by Philip C. Kolin and Colby H. Kullman [University of Alabama Press, 1996].  The July transcript was posted on Rick On Theater on 5 November 2014.)

Following the Misanthrope debacle, Shapiro gave freelancing one more try, apparently successful.  In 1979, Shapiro signed on with Atlanta’s Academy Theatre, the city’s longest-running professional theater, to direct a production of Molière’s Tartuffe (12 January-10 February). 

The Atlanta Constitution dubbed Shapiro’s Tartuffe “a rowdy, bawdy gem, the delight of the year so far.”  Reviewer Helen C. Smith added, “There is nothing subtle about this ‘Tartuffe.’  Guest director Leonardo Shapiro has taken great risks, and for the most part they work extremely well.”

In the Atlanta Gazette, Liza Nelson reported:

Director Shapiro has given the play a physical, almost acrobatic interpretation, with much thrashing and falling about on stage.  He has not, however, lost the emotional edge of the poetry of Tartuffe through the buffoonery.

It went well enough for the Academy to invite him back—and for him to return.  In a press release for William Shakespeare’s (English; 1564 [baptized]-1616) Richard III, part of the troupe’s next season, the Academy noted that Shapiro’s Tartuffe had been “critically acclaimed” and “broke all box office records.”

He led the company’s production of Richard, which ran from 2 to 31 May 1980.  Like his Shaliko productions before and after this period, Shapiro’s Richard III was not strictly conventional.  An Academy Theatre memorandum noted:

The closest I can come in expressing Leo’s treatment of RICHARD III, is to call it “total theatre”.  The production encompasses the entire theatre . . . the aisles, the balcony, players enter from outside entrances, the street.  The back of the house.

In terms that might have described Shaliko’s Ghosts a few years earlier, the memorandum continued:

The theatrical experience of having the play performed in essentially a 360° space, gives the audience a role too—they’re in the play, they could touch the players, can feel the heat of the torches . . . ; their proximity to the action prevents merely passive attention to the play.

Earlier that year, Shapiro directed the première of Friends by Crispin Larangeira (b. 1940), a four-character comedy involving an aging couple who’ve bever been able to forgive each other for staying married so long, their friend on whom they take out their resentment, and the wife’s niece who tries to take the friend away.  It ran 10-27 January 1980 at the New Federal Theatre on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.

Larangeira’s play got a mixed reception, but Shapiro’s staging was judged “ferociously inventive” (Village Voice) and “simple and smooth” (Villager).  Indeed, Tish Dace of the Soho Weekly News said that Shapiro “has an extraordinary capacity for helping actors achieve performances at once natural and ingenious.”

While all the freelance productions received mostly respectable to good reviews—the Atlanta Constitution, for instance, described the classical revivals as “wild and wickedly funny” and “stylish and highly charged” respectively and Marilyn Stasio called Shapiro’s direction of The Youth Hostel “tart” in Cue—Shapiro found he had “totally lost the reason for what I was doing.”

Disenchanted with freelance directing, Shapiro tried to recapture the spirit of ten years earlier when he formed Shaliko.  In 1981, with actress, director, and circus artist Cecil MacKinnon (b. 1945), he attempted to re-form the troupe with a season at Saint Peter’s Hall on West 20th Street in New York’s Chelsea, beginning what Shapiro classified as “Work on New International Plays, Commissions, and Musical Adaptations.” 

Productions in this vein included Daniel Mark Epstein’s (b. 1948) verse play, The Midnight Visitor (December 1981-January 1982); Andrea Dunbar’s (English; 1962-90) The Arbor from England (September-October 1983); Mark Rozovsky’s Kafka: Father and Son from Russia (February-March 1985); Mac Wellman’s (b. 1945) Whirligig (April-May 1989); and the Russian-language première of Kafka: Father and Son in Moscow (spring 1990). 

This second phase of Shaliko ran until 1990—the first phase, from 1972 to 1977, Shapiro dubbed “Meetings with Classical Texts”—but the start was abortive and Shapiro produced only the première of Midnight Visitor in the first season. 

A mystery about a widow, her three daughters, and one daughter’s fiancé gathered in the old family home, The Midnight Visitor attracted Shapiro because of his “weakness for poetry,” which he said had been “one of the few consistent themes in Shaliko from the beginning.” 

Though the production and acting were generally appreciated, the play, described by one critic as “a Gothic opera without the music,” received unanimously bad reviews and Shapiro later concluded that it was simply a bad script. 

After Midnight Visitor, the second production of the new Shaliko Company was to be Molière’s Don Juan starring Christopher Walken (b. 1943) as Don Juan and Wallace Shawn as Sganarelle.  Unhappily, the intended production of what Shapiro said was one of his favorite plays and Molière’s best miscarried for reasons having more to do with Hollywood than New York. 

Because of the death of actress Natalie Wood (29 November 1981; b. 1938), Walken’s co-star on the MGM film Brainstorm (released in 1983), which was in production at the time, the actor’s obligation was unexpectedly extended during the filming and he became unavailable.

Shapiro had everything tied to the plans for the season and when the first play failed and the second foundered, Shaliko lost all its funds and Shapiro was forced to cancel the season.

In 1983, Shapiro tried again to relaunch Shaliko, this time in partnership with Elena Prischepenko (b. 1955), who performed as Elena (or Helen) Nicholas.  (Prischepenko is married to artist and illustrator Scott Cunningham [b. 1956] and sometimes also goes by the name Helen Cunningham.) 

Wallace Shawn had brought a new play, Andrea Dunbar’s The Arbor, from England where it had been produced at London’s Royal Court Theatre to accclaim in 1980, and Prischepenko wanted to produce it in New York.  Shapiro approached Ellen Stewart (1919-2011), who agreed to let him present the play at La MaMa, beginning Shaliko’s association with the Experimental Theatre Club. 

The Arbor provides examples of a number of Shapiro’s principles.  Dunbar, a 15-year-old girl when she wrote the script as a school assignment, had never even seen a play.  An abused child, pregnant and abandoned, she simply wrote down what had happened to her during the day before she went to bed every night, each scene a snapshot of a discrete incident.  

“It’s totally unmediated,” the director explained.  “It is raw experience.”  Shapiro described the play as “about the lumpen proletariat written by the lumpen proletariat,” as if Franz Woyzeck had written Woyzeck.

Allan Wallach described the play in Long Island’s Newsday:

Dunbar didn’t give “The Arbor” a traditional structure or the insights of a writer in touch with her deepest feelings.  The play is a succession of short scenes, most of them as devoid of emotion as snapshots.  Before each scene, the central character [played by Prischepenko], given the author’s own name, provides a brief, Brechtian summary of what will follow.

Wallach also described the play as “a lurid autobiography written in a style which careens between a kitchen table naturalism and an Epic Theater presentational mode” and characterized Shapiro’s production as “energetic.”  Overall, the reviews were mixed, leaning toward the unappreciative. 

Shapiro’s move into La MaMa in 1983 began his second attempt to reestablish Shaliko, but it was a very different company from that disbanded in 1977.  Shapiro acknowledged that the revival was little more than a use of the name to produce shows from project to project.  There was no longer the financial support for a standing company, and many of the original group had left the theater or gone elsewhere to work. 

With their permanent home at the Public Theater no longer available, the freedom to spend months developing ensemble performances was gone.  The length of Shaliko runs was drastically curtailed, reducing the vital contact with an audience they needed to complete the work on their performances and restricting the company’s exposure as well as the chance to build word of mouth. 

Furthermore, La MaMa, more closely identified with a certain kind of theater associated with New York’s East Village than is the New York Shakespeare Festival, did not have the drawing power of the Shakespeare Festival for either audiences or reviewers, and Shaliko productions that might otherwise have attracted valuable attention, like The Yellow House and Kafka’s 1985 première, went under-noticed. 

The association with La MaMa, however, had benefits.  Stewart encouraged Shapiro to rebuild his company merely because she liked him.  She had a reputation since she started the La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club (1961, as Café La MaMa) of supporting non-establishment writers, directors, and theater companies from around the country and the world and she accepted Postmodern theater well before the mainstream culture did. 

She also judged artists not on their proposals, résumés, or track records, but on an almost mystical individual response to their personalities.  Since she never read texts, never did any kind of “in-depth analysis about anybody about anything,” never went to rehearsals unless asked, and seldom even saw a show at La MaMa, Shapiro had virtually complete freedom.  “I don’t go watching what Leo does,” said Stewart; “[h]e’s very secure here.” 

Of course, no strings meant precious little support.  What had always been a rough theater by intention had now become also a poor theater by circumstances.  Stewart provided Shaliko performance and rehearsal space, but didn’t support the company in any other way beyond box office services.  Shaliko even paid its own producer-publicist. 

At the Public Theater, which had given Shaliko no money, Shapiro’d had scene shops, prop and costume collections, and an extensive administrative apparatus available; at La MaMa he had none of these. 

In March 1984, Shapiro and Prischepenko went to Russia with a group of theater professionals under the auspices of the Citizens Exchange Council, a non-profit organization which fostered cultural exchanges between the Soviet Union and the United States. 

The group included director Peter Sellars (b. 1957), director of the Boston Shakespeare Theatre until June 1984 when he resigned to become artistic director of the Kennedy Center’s sort-lived American National Theatre; New York City’s Quaigh Theatre artistic director Will Lieberson (1916-95), and several other directors and playwrights. 

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 (b. 1937; see “Mark Rozovsky & The Theater at the Nikitsky Gate,” 5 October 2020) 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 (Russian: Кафка: отец и сын), “[j]ust like . . . a spy novel.” 

Rozovsky had workshopped Kafka, based mostly on a 100-page letter Franz Kafka (Czech; 1883-1924) wrote, but never sent, to his father (November 1919; Letter to His Father/Brief an der Vater) and parts of “The Judgment” (1912), Kafka’s most autobiographical tale, at the Moscow Art Theater studio but the Ministry of Culture of Soviet Premier Yuri Andropov (1914-84; General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union: 1982-84) suppressed it because the Czech embassy protested. 

Kafka was persona non grata in his native country and, the embassy charged, discussions of his works had been the incitement for the start of the Prague Spring of 1968.

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 January 1985, Shapiro mounted Albert Bermel’s Thrombo, a poorly received political farce about Americans in Africa, as a non-Shaliko production.  In March, he presented the world première of Kafka at La MaMa in a further attempt to relaunch Shaliko as a company. 

Much in line with previous and subsequent Shaliko efforts, Shapiro viewed Kafka: Father and Son as “another exploration of social creativity and repression through the autobiographical lens of the misfit artist . . . .”  It was, he averred, his “most overtly personal piece” and he remarked, “In rehearsal, I find that I am dramatizing my own life.” 

The director also saw Kafka: Father and Son as “a Jewish family play, a play about fathers and sons”—a play about child abuse and repression.  He felt a connection among his father, Joseph Papp, and Hermann Kafka (1854-1931), 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. 

Unfortunately, the production garnered little of the compelling press attention needed to ignite the effort to restart the company: the New York Times didn’t send a critic and Robert Massa of the Village Voice didn’t like it.  The only timely coverage was a smattering of fringe papers.  Paul Berman of The Nation, writing after the closing of the production, about which he wasn’t entirely positive, 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 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. . . . 

And to think that such a play has come and gone without an escort of critics waving and shooting fireworks.

Shapiro changed the design of Kafka for the 1990 version he mounted in Russia and the 1992 revival in New York.  The director continuously reworked his plays, though he seldom got a chance actually to restage them.  (Kafka was the only Shaliko play he remounted not once, but twice—not counting workshops.)

After the first production of Kafka: Father and Son, Shapiro moved into the third phase of his work.  In 1986, with the first professional production of The Yellow House, he began creating what he designated as “Original Collaborative Work.”  Though this effort (from 1986 to 1992) overlapped his work on new plays and commissions (1981 to 1990), it marked a change in the kind of material that occupied most of his attention. 

Instead of finding (or commissioning) texts that spoke to subjects of interest to him, he began creating pieces for what he wanted to communicate.  The performance pieces were far larger in scope than Shaliko’s previous work, and drew on more and more diverse sources for materials and themes. 

Additionally, works like The Yellow House and those that followed were changed, sometimes radically, to occupy each new venue.  The Yellow House also marked Shapiro’s most aggressive efforts to restart Shaliko. 

Shapiro began developing The Yellow House, called The Van Gogh Project in its early stages, in a 1984 workshop with students and faculty of Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, where he was artist-in-residence.  (See “The Yellow House,” 9 February 2018).

Having conceived an intense interest in Vincent van Gogh (Dutch; 1853-90) early in his life, Shapiro spent time at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam while at the 1976 Holland Festival (1-23 June) with Woyzeck.  He began working on a van Gogh piece six years later, “when I was 36 and thinking of killing myself.” 

He was identifying with the painter who, he believed, had been “suicided by society” (a phrase quoted from an Antonin Artaud [French; 1896-1948] essay about the painter in 1965’s Artaud Anthology) when he was 37, but when Shapiro had finished Yellow House four years later, he was already 40 and “had missed jumping out my window of opportunity.”

Working with composer-singer-violinist Julie Lyonn Lieberman (b. 1954), Shapiro and his team created The Yellow House from letters between the painter and his brother Theo as a vehicle for the “personal testimony about the life and the mission of the artist,” a recurring theme in Shapiro’s work.

As a collaboratively built piece, The Yellow House changed as it developed.  At Trinity, it had been “frontal, chronological, direct [and] biographical,” but when the piece was restaged at La MaMa in February 1986 and then at Baltimore’s Theatre of Nations, UNESCO’s periodic global theater festival, in June, it had become more intricate, less linear, and more metaphorical. 

The Yellow House also reintroduced the Shaliko technique of the multiple casting of one role, which Shapiro had used in 1974’s The Measures Taken, passing the role of the Young Comrade among several members of the ensemble as prescribed by Brecht’s script.  In Yellow House, four actors, including a woman, played van Gogh in various avatars: Young Vincent, the Painter, the Mirror, and Self Portrait.  In one remarkable scene, the three last appeared together as the Painter painted his Self Portrait from his reflection in the Mirror.

Shaliko sets were often interactive and in The Yellow House, when van Gogh went mad, the furniture danced in mid-air, manipulated like marionettes by the actors, themselves, in full view of the audience.  Shapiro also staged the production at TON specifically for the huge, vaulting North Hall of the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore.  (The site-specific set was designed by Jerry Rojo, a frequent collaborator of Shapiro’s.)

In a climactic scene that couldn’t have occurred at the La MaMa mounting, the director staged his most striking theatrical effect.  Using the high, vaulted ceiling at the Peabody, Shapiro projected van Gogh’s Starry Night 30 feet above the audience’s heads and had one of the actors playing the painter climb up a rope 23 feet into the “sky” where he stood on a pipe to “paint” the picture.

The Yellow House was perhaps Shaliko’s prettiest production.  Though essentially ignored by critics outside Baltimore (there was one review of the New York production in the theatrical trade paper Back Stage), it received excellent notices at the Theatre of Nations.  Non-linear in structure and surrealistic in design, it was visually stunning, captivating audiences and critics alike. 

This is the production that introduced me to Shapiro’s work.  I was reporting on TON and attended as many of the performances as I could.  I also interviewed several of the artists at the festival, one of whom was Shapiro.  I was greatly taken with Yellow House, possibly the most striking production at TON and one of the most memorable ones I’ve ever seen.  (I didn’t see Shapiro again after that for four years.)

The Yellow House, which Shapiro described in publicity as an “image opera,” began the exploration of the synthesis of arts in performance with Kabuki and Beijing Opera as paradigms.  It was an effort to apply practically Shapiro’s impulse to view gesture as language—to make the non-verbal elements of the performance text as vital and communicative as the literary text.

Though previous Shaliko shows had included music and dance—or at least choreography—with The Yellow House, Shapiro began complecting music, sound, dance, movement, speech, poetry, and slide projections—later film and video, too—more and more into his pieces. 

[The sixth segment of Leonardo Shapiro’s biography will be posted on Monday, 1 May.  I’ll be chronicling Shapiro’s initiation of the Trinity/La MaMa Performing Arts Program and Shaliko’s continuation of its efforts to make collaborative theater.

[I hope that ROTters are finding this biographical series as interesting to read as I had in composing it.  Please come back to Rick On Theater for “A Biography of Leonardo Shapiro, Part 6” on May Day.]

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).