INTERVIEW: Revealing letter is at center of ‘Kafka and Son’

The new play Kafka and Son, written by and starring Alon Nashman, is currently playing the Soho Playhouse Fringe Encore Series in New York City. The dramatic evening of theater depicts the often strained relationship between Franz Kafka and his father. The source material that Nashman and his co-conceiver Mark Cassidy worked off is a letter that the younger Kafka sent to his father, Herrmann.

The letter is a doozy. The missive runs 50 pages and details his life, his work, his thoughts on authority and his feelings for his father. There’s so much Kafka-esque content in the letter that Nashman found ample subject matter for his play, which has toured the world, including stops in South Africa, Turkey and Germany.

“I started reading Kafka when I was in my teens, and he spoke to me then when I think the world became particularly absurd, and threatening and as if no one understood me,” Nashman said in a recent phone interview. “I really acquainted myself with him in much more detail when I took on this project.”

At age 36, Kafka, who would later become a world-famous and much-studied novelist and short story writer, was a complete failure in his own mind. He was not getting published, still living at home and working a tough job as a law clerk.

“He was trying to understand what had gone wrong, and he attributed a lot of it to this very fraught relationship with his father,” Nashman said. “He decided to write a letter. … It became a monumental thing, longer than most of Kafka’s short stories, and it chronicles all the details of his early life. So people regard it as his autobiography in a sense, but it’s also this incredible analysis of a relationship in which two people are reaching for each other through the haze of complete misunderstanding and different approaches to life.”

To adapt the piece for the stage, Nashman “sliced and diced” the letter and added fiction, diary writing and other Kafka letters. He played with the phrasing of individual sentences, so they could transition nicely to the theatrical world.

“In the letter itself, Kafka does conjure his father,” the playwright said. “He imagines what the father would have responded, so the father is there and as a kind of Frankenstein monster because by the end of the letter, the father has taken over and destroyed all of Franz’s arguments.”

The show is physically demanding on Nashman. The playwright called the content so tortured and the characters so vigorous that he’s tired by the end of a performance. “Franz has this incredibly fertile mind, and the father [is] overbearing, almost like a monster figure,” he said. “So it’s just one of those intense plays that demand everything.”

Nashman said Kafka lovers will be especially enticed by the drama. However, that doesn’t mean newbies to the writer won’t walk away with some lessons learned.

“It’s not really about Kafka per say,” he said. “It’s about this relationship. It’s about an epic father-son situation and situation of which authority is being questioned, and it relates to anyone who had a relationship with a teacher, or a parent or with the law that feels oppressive and incomprehensible. So you don’t really need to know Kafka to appreciate the play.”

By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com

Kafka and Son is currently playing the Soho Playhouse Fringe Encore Series in New York City. Click here for more information and tickets.