[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).
