ABSTRACT
This 20-year-old playwriting exercise grew out of my riding the Metro North train from New York City’s Grand Central Station to New Haven, Connecticut, late at night several times a week while teaching at Yale. While riding home I found myself interrupted frequently, and I resorted to many devices to avoid unwanted late-night conversations: feigning sleep, obsessively reading newspapers, poring over my MFA students’ scripts. I encountered kindred spirits one day when I read Franz Kafka and Max Brod’s wry entry from “The First Long Train Journey,” published in 1912 in Herder-Blätter, in which a traveler recounts his attempts to isolate himself from his fellow travelers.
My going to sleep in a train is literally a tidy piece of work…. For there is hardly a place where utterly opposing ways of life are thrown into such close, direct and surprising proximity as in a railway carriage, and as a result of continuous mutual observation they begin to exert an influence upon each other in the shortest of times.
After reading this entry, it occurred to me to create an exercise for my playwrights invoking the spirit of the Kafka and Brod ride. I wanted to counter what my students were calling “writer’s block” with a new exercise. One that would take pressure off the writer by creating a neutral zone that had nothing to do with what the playwright was currently writing. By providing a series of parameters, a set of creative limitations like the close quarters of a continuously moving train, the exercise would release the subconscious, allowing the playwright to write freely. So I created the “Kafka’s Train” exercise. I have used it at Yale, the University of Houston, Hunter College, Fordham/Primary Stages, and The Kennedy Center in workshops. The exercise has generated well over 500 short scenes or ten-minute plays, many of which have grown into full-length plays that have been produced in major venues.