Frank Joseph Galati was born on Nov. 29, 1943, in Highland Park, Ill., north of Chicago. His father, also named Frank, was a dog trainer and boarder, and his mother, Virginia (Cassel) Galati, was a saleswoman with Marshall Field, the department store.
He grew up in Northbrook, Ill., and enrolled at Northwestern, where one of his earliest notices resulted from his appearance in a faculty and student talent show in 1964.
“A born comic, Frank Galati of Northbrook, a junior in the school of speech, made eight appearances,” The Chicago Tribune wrote. “In one, he portrayed a professor who spent so much time telling his class how far behind it was that he never caught up with the class schedule.”
Mr. Galati had a lifelong fascination with Gertrude Stein, which he incorporated into his theatrical life beginning in the mid-1970s, when he directed a reading of some of her works called “Have They Attacked Mary. He Giggled.” — a title borrowed from a Stein work. In 1976, for the Chicago Opera Theater, he directed “The Mother of Us All,” the Virgil Thomson opera for which Ms. Stein wrote the libretto.
In 1987, at the Goodman, he staged perhaps his most ambitious Stein-inspired piece, “She Always Said, Pablo,” featuring Ms. Stein’s words and Pablo Picasso’s works — the one a writer who expanded our view of language, the other an artist who changed our way of seeing. Richard Christiansen, reviewing it for The Tribune, called it “a high point of Galati’s work as an interpretive artist.” The production was later seen at the Kennedy Center in Washington.
Mr. Galati said he found Ms. Stein’s texts mesmerizing.
“They’re just beautiful to listen to,” he told The Tribune in 1987. “They gallop, leap, jump and tinkle in our ears.”
