Robert Kalfin

Robert Zangwill Kalfin (born 1933) is an American stage director and producer who has worked on and off Broadway and at regional theaters throughout the country. He is a former artistic director of the Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park and the founder/artistic director of The Chelsea Theater Center.

Robert Zangwill Kalfin was born in 1933 to a Jewish couple of Russian descent. Alfred Kalfin was a cabinetmaker in England until shortly after his 18th birthday, when he moved to the United States and went into real estate. Hilda Kalfin taught kindergarten. Robert has a sister, Eleanor Royte, three years younger.

The Kalfins shared a respect for the arts, particularly music, and they provided piano lessons and visits to concerts and opera. Kalfin's maternal grandmother wrote and recited poetry, worked with amateur theater groups, and loved to sing and folk dance.

Kalfin attended Alfred University, where he majored in psychology and became involved with the drama club. He received an MFA from the Yale School of Drama in 1957.

Although Kalfin has worked as a freelance director on and off Broadway, he is best known as the founder/artistic director of the Chelsea Theater Center.

In the early 1960s, New York's commercial Off-Broadway was ending its golden years. There were very few not-for-profit theaters in New York, but funding was becoming available, both from the government and private corporations. Kalfin had long dreamed of starting his own theater. This was the time.

Kalfin wanted to develop a non-profit theater whose work was as professional and polished as the most heavily backed commercial productions and as daring as commercial Off-Broadway had been in earlier days, an institution that resembled the great European subsidized theaters. With George Bari, who had been a stage manager, and David Long, who had been a company manager, he founded the Chelsea Theater Center in the Chelsea neighborhood in Manhattan in 1965.

Kalfin produced his first season in St Peter's, an Episcopal Church, with a large adjoining Parish Hall that had been converted into a gymnasium. The Chelsea later moved to the Church of the Holy Apostles. Both were in lower Manhattan. After conflicts at each church, the Chelsea became the resident theater of the Brooklyn Academy of Music, from 1968-1978.

With the move, Kalfin acquired two new partners. Michael David had studied theater administration at Yale; he currently produces on Broadway as a partner in Dodger Theatricals. Burl Hash had studied stagecraft at Yale and could find imaginative ways to construct scenery on the theater's tight budget.

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