Of the many torments that Franz Kafka suffered throughout his all-too-brief life — depression, anxiety, insomnia, suicidal ideation — none looms larger than his tortured relationship with his father. It lies at the center of several of his greatest works, including The Judgment and The Metamorphosis, and lurks as a menacing presence in many others. Kafka lived with his father, Hermann, along with his mother and three sisters, in a cramped Prague apartment well into his adulthood. It was bad enough that he regarded himself as an irredeemable disappointment in the eyes of the brusque, business-minded Hermann. What was worse was having to live in close quarters with the man.
One need not be a Freudian to recognize that a great deal of Kafka’s neuroses can be traced to his feelings of inadequacy in relation to his father. Franz realized this himself, and in 1919, still unable to confront Hermann directly, he decided to unburden himself by writing to his father. The note would eventually stretch into a sprawling 47-page document, in which Kafka reproached his father for two decades’ worth of emotional abuse, physical maltreatment, psychological cruelty, and the “incalculable inner harm” that such callous behavior had wrought upon him. “Dearest Father,” began the letter,
You asked me recently why I am so afraid of you. As usual, I was unable to think of any answer to your question, partly for the very reason that I am afraid of you. And partly because an explanation for the grounds of this fear would mean going into far more details than I could ever keep in mind while talking. … What I would have needed was a little encouragement, a little friendliness. But I wasn’t fit for that. What was also incomprehensible to me was your total lack of feeling for the suffering and shame you could inflict on me with your words and judgments. It was as though you had no notion of your power.
Kafka’s Letter to His Father stands today as one of the most remarkable records of a writer’s relationship with a parent ever written, as well as one of the saddest inquiries into Kafka’s own life and mind. It would not, at least at first glance, suggest itself as the ideal material for a stage adaptation. But director James Rutherford and actor Michael Guagno have done exactly this in Letter to My Father, a COVID-era play that is performed live and streamed online, creating an onstage version of Kafka who has come out of his casing to confront his father in pointed verbal combat.
The way they have done so is ingenious. During the first few dialogue-free minutes of the play, we see Kafka (Guagno) inside a cluttered office frantically gathering papers and folders, stuffing them into boxes, and then stacking the boxes onto shelves. Kafka puts on a shirt and tie and gathers a few more papers, and then the play throws us a surprising slider. Instead of sitting down to write his letter, Kafka puts on a pair of headphones, sits down at a desk with two computer monitors in front of him, and begins reciting the letter into a broadcast microphone. This is surely the most 2020s version of Kafka imaginable — Kafka as a podcaster.
Guagno plays Kafka as a harried office worker and an even more agitated son. His tone starts off calm and then gradually amps up into a frenzied pace before slowing down again into a more measured trot. This up-and-down delivery continues for the rest of the performance, accompanied by ominous, ethereal synth music that makes us feel as if we’ve just stepped inside the set of a David Lynch film. Kafka’s hair is disheveled, his legs shake, his feet twitch, his tone is often nervous and hesitant, and at times, he stumbles over his words. When recounting a childhood incident when he asked his father for water and his father, instead of bringing him a glass of water, lifted him out of his bed and put him outside in the cold, he climbs off his chair and cowers underneath his desk, as if in fear that his father will somehow materialize from behind the stacks of boxes and assault him right then and there. “That was merely the beginning of things,” Kafka states. “But this feeling of powerlessness, which still regularly overcomes me … stems in many ways from how you treated me.” When he recalls certain things his father told him, instead of reciting them in his own voice, he plays us brief recordings of his father’s voice that have been downloaded onto his computer’s hard drive.
The source material is already discomfiting enough, and M-34’s decision to make the play available to audiences through three different Twitch streams playing simultaneously on a single screen makes it even more discomfiting — unnecessarily so, in my view. One screen, and one stream, is more than sufficient for conveying the depths of Kafka’s agony, so astutely rendered by Guagno and Rutherford.
The actual history of Letter to His Father is one of the most Kafkaesque stories in the author’s oeuvre. When Kafka finished writing the letter, into which he had poured all his hopes for reconciliation with his father, he gave it to his mother, Julie. After reading it, she returned the letter to her son, thinking it best not to bother her husband with such matters. Kafka, still too terrified of upsetting his father, held on to it and hid it away with the rest of his unpublished manuscripts, which he had commanded his friend Max Brod to destroy upon his death. He did not have the nerve to attempt to hand the letter to his father himself.
Kafka died five years later, at the age of 40, from complications of tuberculosis. One of the many tragedies of his short, tragic life is that he never had the confrontation with his father that he was aiming to achieve through his letter. “I had long given up all hope of salvation,” Kafka wrote in the letter, echoing the famous admonition to sinners about to pass through the gates of hell in the opening of Canto III of Dante’s Inferno. He may indeed have despaired of redemption during his life, but adaptations such as Letter to My Father show us that, for Kafka, there may yet be hope in his afterlife.
Daniel Ross Goodman is a writer and a doctoral candidate at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. He is currently working on his next book, a novel about the life of Franz Kafka.
