Robert Kalfinn: Still In The Avant-Garde
Robert Kalfin has directed plays on Broadway, Off and Off Off Broadway, on television, in America's major regional theaters, in Europe, in the Middle East, and as far afield as Siberia.
But his main claim to fame, and the gig closest to his heart, are the years he spent as founder and artistic director of the celebrated not-for-profit Chelsea Theater Center, an experimental company that debuted in a space at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in the mid-'60s and later moved to various downtown Manhattan addresses.
"You may hate it, but you won't see it anywhere else," was its in-your-face motto.
Shaky Financial Limbs
During those halcyon years, Mr. Kalfin said during a recent interview at his house in Springs, he and his company lived so close to the edge there was hardly a moment of respite.
Time and again he manned the barricades to fight for his avant-garde theatrical beliefs in the face of funding cuts and public scoffing - somehow, mostly, prevailing.
The fruits of the financial limbs he went out on for the sake of his artistic vision were loyal audiences and prestigious awards, along with harrowing budget crunches that often cut his seasons short.
In 1975, the Chelsea won the Margo Jones Award for "the most significant contribution to dramatic art through the continued production of new plays."
Over the years, it also garnered five Tony Awards, four Tony nominations, 21 Obies, two Drama Desk nominations, and five Outer Critics Circle Awards, among numerous other laurels.
Coup De Grace
But ironically, after it canceled its 1982 season in order to pay off its debts, it was denied funding for having failed to produce any plays that year. This catch-22 was the Chelsea's coup de grace.
Remarkably young-looking for his years - in his profession one must remain childlike, he said - Mr. Kalfin was born in the Bronx in 1933. He attended the High School of Music and Art there, where, in something very like a horse trade, he was assigned to play the bass fiddle. "They checked your teeth and hands to match you with an instrument," he explained.
At Alfred University in western New York State, the two-man theater department exposed him to the works of Brecht, Anouilh, and Giraudoux, prompting him to switch his major from English and psychology to drama.
Wild And Daunting
With the help of student artists, he recreated Greek ruins and the Roman Colosseum in the college gym, and wrote music for the far-out productions he staged. In his senior year he directed and wrote the score for a musical version of William Saroyan's "Opera, Opera," a wild work starring a singing gorilla and a dead tenor.
At the Yale School of Drama he studied acting and set design along with directing, and staged "Adam the Creator," an experimental Karel Capek play with a daunting recurrent sound cue: "The destruction of the world."
Mr. Kalfin mounted his first New York production, H. Leivick's "The Golem," in 1959. A Yiddish classic that questions the morality of loosing a monstrous destructive force into the world, even in self-defense, it coincided with the rise of the Ban the Bomb movement in an America deeply troubled about the probity of deploying atomic weapons.
Barometric Relevance
"Artists are barometers that register the subconscious fears and dreams of a society," Mr. Kalfin said. "As an artistic director, part of my job is to intuit and present plays that address these unspoken concerns. I was subliminally aware of the relevance of 'The Golem,' and audiences and the press picked up on it immediately."
When Mr. Kalfin opened his Chelsea Theater Center in 1965, there were few nonprofit playhouses in New York. During the next 10 years their number increased, even as costs escalated and funding sources dried up.
While many artistic directors veered prudently toward conservatism, Mr. Kalfin and his partners, Michael David and Burl Hash, remained at the forefront of the avant-garde.
When black separatism threatened integration efforts in the late '60s, these three white producers staged some of the first militant black plays, among them "The Great Goodness of Life: A Coon Show," by Leroi Jones, now Amiri Baraka.
Revolutions On Stage
A landmark production of Mr. Baraka's "Slave Ship" in 1969 stunned and radicalized even its African American cast, along with audiences and critics.
As Newsweek's Jack Kroll described it: "On opening night, screaming slaves reached out clawing for help from the New York Times's Clive Barnes, a nausea-racked slave retched realistically in the lap of Norman Nadel of the Scripps-Howard papers, and during a slave auction a little black boy was 'sold' to The New Yorker's Edith Oliver."
When the women's movement began to sweep the country, Mr. Kalfin gave voice to that revolution, too, producing such feminist plays as "Lady Day: A Musical Tragedy," by Aishah Rahman.
Rave Reviews
Stopping at nothing to challenge the theatergoer's complacency, the Chelsea also asked Jewish audiences to reflect on the humanity of a Nazi sympathizer, urged young audiences to feel compassion for the elderly, and prodded senior citizens to get with what the kids were up to. It also inspired Americans to discover such European dramatists as Heinrich von Kleist, Jean Genet, and Peter Handke.
"The communal experience of the theater is where we can find our shared humanity," Mr. Kalfin said. He routinely hired actors, designers, and technicians from divergent cultural backgrounds to work together on productions.
As the Chelsea expanded operations into Manhattan, its productions garnered even more critical and audience support. Stagings of Jean Genet's "The Screens," Allen Ginsberg's poem "Kaddish," adapted by Mr. Kalfin, Gay's "The Beggar's Opera," and an adaptation of Isaac Bashevis Singer's "Yentl" all received rave reviews.
The Chelsea Years
Even Broadway stars began to take notice. Among those who went downtown and worked for minimum wages to be involved in the Chelsea experience were Glenn Close, Frank Langella, Christopher Lloyd, and Meryl Streep.
The producer/director Hal Prince staged a Chelsea revival of the musical "Candide," which had flopped on Broadway, in a radical, environmental set designed by Eugene Lee, the designer of "Sweeney Todd" and "Showboat." "Candide" then made a triumphal return to a Broadway theater that had been gutted in order to replicate his innovative staging.
In his foreword to David Napoleon's "Chelsea on the Edge: The Adventures of an American Theater," Mr. Prince quotes Mr. Kalfin as saying, "I was naive enough to believe . . ."
"That tells the entire story as far as I'm concerned," Mr. Prince writes. "The Chelsea years were those of idealism, of confrontation, of public roiling in pursuit of principles; and these years gave way to materialism."
"I got tired of fund raising," Mr. Kalfin put it more simply.
Streep Sang For Him
Life after the Chelsea? Mr. Kalfin has traveled all over the world to direct. Among the first ambassador-artists invited to Russia after the fall of the Iron Curtain, he staged an acclaimed version of Leo Tolstoy's "Strider" in Moscow, later presenting a Russian translation of Thornton Wilder's "The Skin of Our Teeth," among other Western plays.
He directed an English translation of "Strider" on Broadway, and a Broadway production of "Happy End" with Christopher Lloyd and the then unknown Meryl Streep - the only time she sang on stage. He also presented Mario Fratti's "The Cage" Off Off Broadway, and Von Kleist's "The Prince of Hamburg," starring Frank Langella, for PBS's "Great Performances" TV series.
The peripatetic director also staged a splendid production of David Mamet's "A Life in the Theater" at Bay Street two summers ago, a Russian version of Tennessee Williams's "The Eccentricities of a Nightingale" in Moscow, and the first regional production of the Broadway hit "Death Defying Acts" at the Coconut Grove Playhouse in Florida last winter.
Mr. Kalfin, not surprisingly, is now in rehearsal for yet another unprecedented venture: New York's 81-year-old Yiddish Folkesbeine Theater has invited him to stage a musical version of a story about a female rabbi in the Ukraine in the 1820s.
"She built her own synagogue and was so brilliant she had to be stopped," he said. "She was forced into a disastrous marriage and made to have children; she fled. Now there's a new book out about a woman becoming Pope. Things always happen in rushes; artists sense them in the air."
The work, to be performed in Yiddish with simultaneous English and Russian translations, was composed by an American, John Clifton, who speaks only English, the director said.
Something Wonderful
"I don't speak Yiddish or Russian myself, but with all sorts of language coaches, I'm training the cast to think in Yiddish. A non-Jewish composer is setting the music, which reads from left-to-right, to Yiddish lyrics, a polyglot dialect written in the Hebrew alphabet, which reads from right to left. Somehow, it will all work out."
Mr. Kalfin's dream, of course, is eventually to have another theater with a repertory acting company, like those in Europe. "When you have a home, and work with an ensemble, you develop a relationship of trust in which everyone can take the risks that make things exciting," he said.
"I'm fearless," he concluded. "If you want to try a scene walking on your hands, do it, I say. In Russia, the whole company went to the sauna en masse and talked about the production. I'd like that here. Something wonderful happens, emotionally and psychologically, from being together."