Robert Kalfin, a director, producer, and co-founder of the Chelsea Theater Center in New York City, died on Sept. 20 at the Kanas Center for Hospice Care in Quiogue. The cause was complications from leukemia. Mr. Kalfin, who lived on Harbor View Lane in Springs, was 89.
Playbill magazine wrote that Mr. Kalfin’s “combination of psychological intensity and dramaturgical rigor became his calling card as a director throughout the 1960s and 1970s,” when “he was a frequent face in the thriving Off Broadway scene.”
“Actors of significant cultural heft would often take union minimum salaries in order to work on a Kalfin-directed production,” Playbill wrote. They included Meryl Streep, Glenn Close, Frank Langella, and Christopher Lloyd. In 1973, he “partnered with Hal Prince to produce a revival of Leonard Bernstein’s ‘Candide,’ “ the work’s first commercially successful production. After its premiere at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, it moved to Broadway.
Robert Zangwill Kalfin was born in New York City on April 22, 1933, to Alfred Kalfin and the former Hilda Shulman. He grew up in New York and showed his creativity at an early age, composing songs, playing the piano, and developing puppet shows and plays, wrote his nephew, Joshua Royte. “Bob’s creativity was stoked by an outspoken Jewish grandmother, Masha Shulman, who required visitors to share a talent — a song, a poem — at her weekly salons. He was also surrounded by many, many creative cousins, uncles, and aunts.”
Mr. Kalfin, his nephew wrote, was “musical, extremely funny, ridiculously clumsy, but also intensely curious about the human condition. He sought the most creative ways to expose inequities among peoples, to highlight our foibles and elevate the unsung.”
He graduated from Alfred University in Alfred, N.Y., in 1954 before earning an M.F.A. from the Yale School of Drama in 1957.
He directed scores of plays, musicals, and readings of scripts he considered worthy of production because they spotlighted lesser-known histories brimming with “human inventiveness in the face of fear, discrimination, or ludicrous bureaucracy,” his nephew wrote. These included some of the first Black militant and feminist plays as well as works that confronted ageism and antisemitism.
“When he lacked producers for his socially important but far-from-commercial work, he responded by founding the nonprofit Chelsea Theater Center” in 1965, his nephew wrote. Mr. Kalfin’s co-founders were George Bari and David Long. Mr. Bari, who had been a stage manager, was Mr. Kalfin’s partner for more than 50 years.
Mr. Kalfin, Mr. Royte wrote, was known as an iconoclastic, innovative director and willing mentor to many actors, producers, and other directors. In 2015, the Off Broadway Alliance honored him as a Legend of Off Broadway. He was nominated for a Tony Award for “Happy End” and won a Special Tony Award for “Candide.” He won a Vernon Rice Award as artistic director for the Chelsea Theater Center and was a three-time Drama Desk Outstanding Director Award winner.
For Mr. Kalfin and Mr. Bari, Springs was a summer residence and retreat, Mr. Kalfin’s nephew wrote. There he cultivated friendships with neighbors, his regular swimming companions, relatives, “even a friend from his boyhood summer camp,” and members of Chabad of the Hamptons. He spent his later years developing new plays, an opera on the life of Richard Wagner, and fostering works and mentoring others in New York and around the world.
“His humor persisted into his final, peaceful days,” his nephew wrote, and “his joie de vivre lives on in the many and often hilarious stories we will remember through our lives.”
Along with Mr. Royte, Mr. Kalfin is survived by many cousins and nieces. Mr. Bari died in 2013. A sister also died before him.
Mr. Royte has suggested memorial contributions to the Entertainment Community Fund, a charitable organization that supports performers and behind-the-scenes workers in the performing arts, at 729 Seventh Avenue, 10th Floor, New York City 10019, or entertainmentcommunity.org.
