Vaclav Havel Archives - TheaterScene.net

Vaclav Havel

In Corpo

June 30, 2023

Press materials promise a work that is inspired by Kafka's "The Castle" and Melville's "Bartleby, the Scrivener." Both are name checked – the lead character is called K, played by a clear-voiced Zoe Siegel, and there is even a Bartleby (Austin Owens Kelly, doing triple duty on synthesizer and later acoustic guitar) who says "I prefer not to" very often – but "In Corpo" also owes something to Vaclav Havel's "The Memorandum" with its depiction of bureaucracy gone mad. Of course, not even Havel could have envisioned the tyranny of the complex password, something "In Corpo" uses to excellent comic effect. The show is at its best when it satirizes things that everyone has to deal with, such as passwords and inane tasks. [more]

Audience (The Czechoslovak-American Marionette Theatre)

June 25, 2021

Havel’s Audience represents CAMT’s first foray into modern Czech literature having previously staged imaginative productions of folk material. This visit to contemporary theater, unfortunately, wasn’t as successful as most of CAMT’s fairytale presentations. The combination of whimsical marionettes and psychologically sophisticated drama didn’t gel. The autobiographical Audience pits Havel’s alter-ego, Ferdinand Vanĕk (played by Vít Hořejš who also translated and directed the play), against The Brewmaster (Theresa Linnihan) in what initially seemed to be casual, directionless banter during a workday at a beer brewing company. Preceding the actual play were a series of historic newsreels—prepared by Suzanna Halsey—showing how Czechoslovakia (when it was still called Czechoslovakia) descended from the high hopes of 1968—euphemistically called the Prague Spring—to the depths of despair following the Soviet Union’s crushing invasion to put down what they perceived as a pro-West revolution. The newsreel images were far more frightening than Havel’s two hander which is clearly meant to reveal in everyday terms just how nefariously the communist, totalistic credo infiltrated daily life in Prague. [more]

Havel: the Passion of Thought

July 24, 2019

The three Havel one acts, known as "The Vanek Plays," though written separately, were originally banned in Czechoslovakia and performed secretly in people’s living rooms as well as being passed around in hand-written copies. They all deal with Vanek, a dissident playwright unable to have his plays produced, who is now working in a menial job, an alter ego for its author and his experiences under Communism. The problem with filling out the program to include both Pinter’s "The New World Order" and Beckett’s "Catastrophe" (dedicated to Havel) is that since the plays all have the same theme and development, it feels like overkill. [more]