Kafka and Son - Alon Nashman

THEATURTLE / THRESHOLD
Kafka
and Son
adapted by Mark Cassidy and Alon Nashman
from Franz Kafka’s
Letter to His Father
Kafka
and Son
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
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
Alon Nashman
Theaturtle/Threshold
127 Havelock Street
Toronto, ON
phone: (416) 530 4429
fax: (416) 530 4109
email: anashman@sympatico.ca
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
Theaturtle
Founded 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 Runaway Theatrical Success.” (Globe and Mail).
Threshold
Founded 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.
Press
“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
★★★★★
“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
“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
“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
★★★★★
“A haunting and visually arresting
monodrama… Alon Nashman is brilliant as
both the timid, physically slight author of
such ground-breaking works as The Metamorphosis and The Trial as well as his cold,
imposing, raspy-voiced dad. Director and coadaptator 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
“An intense piece of theatre... one of the most
revelatory aspects of this thought-provoking
hour is the way that it helps us better understand the works of this tortured genius.... Nashman 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 understated 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
“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 music... 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
“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
“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
“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