Kafka and Sonadapted by Mark Cassidy and Alon Nashman

from Franz Kafka’s Letter to His Father

THeaTurTLe / THresHoLd

winner of:list awards

here or inside

Performance alon Nashman

Direction Mark Cassidy

Set Marysia Bucholc and Camellia Koo

Costume Barbara singer

Lighting andrea Lundy

Sound darren Copeland

Photography Cylla von Tiedemann

Contact alon Nashman

Theaturtle/Threshold 127 Havelock Street Toronto, ON phone: (416) 530 4429 fax: (416) 530 4109 email: anashman@sympatico.ca

Kafka and Son

2008 BriCKeNdeN award (London, ON) Outstanding Touring Production

2007 “BesT iN FesT” in Edmonton, Winnipeg, Ottawa, and Toronto Fringe Festivals

2007 Nomination: MeCCa award (Montreal, QC) Outstanding Touring Production

2007 Presented at the National Theatre of iceland

2006 Two Nominations: dora Mavor Moore award (Toronto, ON) Outstanding Set Design Outstanding Lighting Design

2005 Presented at world stage: Flying solo Festival

Synopsis

At the age of 36 Franz Kafka was still living at home, a petty bureaucrat, a failed artist, a timid Jewish son. His father, boorish and overbearing, was his constant nemesis.

What to do?

Kafka wrote, in this case a letter to his father leaving no stone unturned in his quest for the truth between them. In so doing he reveals deep connections between his life and his fiction, in work such as The Judgement, The Metamorphosis and The Trial. As he confesses to his father, “all my writing was about you.”

Adapted from this monumental (and undelivered) letter, Kafka and son is a blistering, often hilarious, dissection of domestic authority, and a revelatory visit with one of the architects of the modern psyche.

History

TheaturtleFounded by Alon Nashman, Theaturtle creates essential ecstatic theatre, which touches the earth and agitates the soul. Past productions include The song by Adam Nashman described as “...a tribute to the possibilities of the human body and the human imagination,” (National Post), and alphonse by Wajdi Mouawad, which was hailed as “A One-Man Wonder” (Toronto Star) and “A Run-away Theatrical Success.” (Globe and Mail).

ThresholdFounded by Mark Cassidy and Suzanne Hersh, Threshold Theatre is known for its inventive adaptations, exciting environmental works and fresh approaches to scripts. Past productions include Forms of Devotion, “A seamless wonder” (Toronto Star), Howl, “Charismatic, thrilling, remarkable” (Now Magazine), and as i Lay dying “Tremendous...utterly compelling...a knockout show.” (Edmonton Journal).

Kafka and Son was developed with the assistance of the Ashkenaz Festival of New Yiddish Culture, the World Stage: Flying Solo Festival, and the Al Green Theatre in Toronto where it premiered in March 2006. Kafka and son has since toured to many Canadian Fringe Festivals, and to the National Theatre of Iceland.

“Kafka and Son is a thrilling adaptation of an unmailed letter from the novelist to his overbearing father.... brilliantly realized in Mark Cassidy’s production.... Alon Nashman’s performance of both roles is flawless, vocally, physically and imaginatively: what, in light of Kafka Junior’s tortured timidity, you might call a tour de faiblesse.”

Robert Cushman National Post, Mar. 11, 2006

Press

“A fantasia on a thorny father-son relationship realized in ingenious stage imagery, and shedding an eerie light on an enigmatic artist in the process. In a double performance of extreme and precise virtuosity, Nashman is both the frustrated writer locked into a dreary life as a petty bureaucrat, a notable failure with women and still living at home at age 36, and the harsh, overbearing tyrant of a father who terrorizes him, demeans him, and is, in an agonizing way, his doppelganger, his doom and his muse.”

Liz Nicholls Edmonton Journal, Aug. 5, 2007

HHHHH

“What makes Nashman’s performance a humanist treat are those moments of humour and empathy he finds and accentuates in Kafka’s writing about his father.... [Nashman] conveys the requisite strength and vulnerability so expertly that you almost forget this is the same performer, more or less at the same moment.... intellectually convincing, sparing and startling theatricality.”

Kamal al-Solaylee, Globe and Mail, Mar. 8, 2006

“By turns bitterly funny, heartbreaking, and chilling. Much of the credit for this goes to solo performer Alon Nashman, playing both Franz and his father with smooth precision and incredible intensity. By the show’s beautiful ending, you’ll feel as if Franz is an old friend. Go see this remarkable production.”

Joff Schmidt, CBC Winnipeg, Jul. 19, 2007

HHHHH

“A content-rich, brilliantly realized monodrama like Alon Nashman’s Kafka and Son can’t help but tower over the Fringe. Nashman’s fully committed, physical performance traces its emotional path from caged frustration to the desperate, final flight toward art’s timeless promise of freedom.”

Matt Radz, The Gazette Montreal, Jun. 11, 2007

“Clotted black feathers, a white plume, a spinning silvery cage, a grating, rasping chuckle—each is a brushstroke in a horrifically beautiful nightmare. Alon Nashman, in this adaptation of Franz Kafka’s letter to his domineering father, never stoops to sentimentality in this memorable performance. Uneasy tension flavours much of this unsettling production imbuing Kafka’s words with the echoing rattle of a pebble tossed into an abyss of inarticulate love between two disparate personalities. Chilling, unexpectedly, grotesquely funny at times, Kafka and Son is pure, unadulterated, surreal goodness.”

Eva Marie Clarke, VueWeekly, Edmonton, Aug. 23, 2007

HHHHH

“Alon Nashman shines as Kafka and Son... The design is equally striking. Andrea Lundy’s razor-sharp lighting and Camellia Koo’s adaptation of Marysia Bucholc’s set marked by cages and black feathers suggestive of ashes tell their own tale of entrapment. Darren Copeland’s soundscape is often eerily dissonant, though an occasional klezmer melody suggests a rare moment of happier times.”

Jon Kaplan, NOW Magazine, Mar. 16, 2006

“An intense piece of theatre... one of the most revelatory aspects of this thought-provoking hour is the way that it helps us better under-stand the works of this tortured genius.... Nash-man paints his portrait of Kafka with strokes of sheer desperation.... Andrea Lundy lights it to perfection with her usual minimalist precision.... many moments of sheer under- stated artistry that make Kafka & Son well worth seeing.”

Richard Ouzounian, Toronto Star, Mar. 7, 2006

“Nashman is superb at conveying the exact tone of the letter. This is not a rant or an emotional plea but an attempt to analyze as rationally as possible how a father’s very nature has led a son to feel worthless.... central not only to understanding Kafka, but... to understanding the alienation that can exist between any two people or between mankind and creator.”

Christopher Hoile, Eye Magazine, Mar. 16, 2006

“In this Canadian monologue we come to understand the subconscious feelings and memories which had piled up in the body of the frail and neglected child Franz, and which later appeared as nightmares in his writing. Marysia Bucholc’s set reminds one of the polish theatre guru Grotowski and his cry for poor theatre ...Simple, clean symbols, which evoke imaginative pictures, very important when one culture is talking to another in theatre.”

Maria Kristjansdottir, Morgunbladid, Reykjavik, Iceland, Oct. 20, 2007

“The best show I’ve seen at the Fringe. The performance took my breath away!... it looked like one if those expressionist movies with the actor projecting his inner turmoil in exaggerated gestures, in a face that was transformed into a mask of 100 expressions enhanced by stark spotlights, immense shadows looming against the backdrop and crashing mu-sic... The wire and metal constructions on stage had the actor caught in twisted cages, locked behind bars, enclosed into prisons and then we see him …liberating himself from theses wire structures like a bird frantically trying to fly away... Go see this, it is brilliant.”

Alvina Ruprecht, CBC Radio, Ottawa, Jun. 17, 2007

“A haunting and visually arresting monodrama… Alon Nashman is brilliant as both the timid, physically slight author of such ground-breaking works as The Meta-morphosis and The Trial as well as his cold, imposing, raspy-voiced dad. Director and co- adaptator Mark Cassidy deftly ushers viewers into a tortured soul desperate to escape crippling self-hatred and a father’s shadow. There are few productions as fully realized as Kafka and Son.”

Kevin Prokosh, Winnipeg Free Press, Jul. 17, 2007

HHHHH

“All in all, Kafka and Son is an example of theatre at its best. Definitely go to it!”

Lynn Slotkin, CBC Radio, Mar. 8, 2006