Havel: The Passion of Thought

Once upon a time, not all that long ago, I watched certain political plays with a sense of distance, deeply sympathetic to the characters and deeply grateful that those awful things weren't happening to me. Then a certain election happened, our country changed with breath-taking rapidity, and some of my white privilege bit the dust.

This all struck me, hard, while watching PTP/NYC's excellent evening of one acts, Havel: The Passion of Thought, which consists of three plays by Václav Havel, one by Harold Pinter, and one by Samuel Beckett. Václav Havel was a dissident playwright in Czechoslovakia who was harassed for years, spent time in jail, was beaten, and became president when communism was toppled. He didn't actually choose to be a dissident: "We simply went ahead and did certain things that we felt we ought to do, and that seemed to us decent to do, nothing more nor less.”

As assembled by director Richard Romagnoli, with the Pinter first, the Beckett last, and the Havels in between, Havel: The Passion of Thought takes us on a journey that includes terror, powerlessness, and farce. Our guide for the journey is the character Vanek (David Barlow), a man who upsets other people's balance simply by living an honest life. Vanek is the protagonist of the three Havel plays, and via Romagnoli's structure, appears in the other plays as well.

In Pinter's The New World Order, the Vanek-ish character merely sits there as two torturers discuss what they are going to do to them. Their dialogue reveals them as monsters, but human ones.

In the first Havel play, Interview, Vanek has an extended discussion with his boss. Due to a government crackdown on the arts, the best job Vanek has been able to get is moving kegs from one place to another in a brewery (this is directly from Havel's own life). His boss is overfond of the brewery's product, and the seemingly friendly conversation throbs with menace. Vanek says little and remains calm throughout.

Michael Laurence, David Barlow
Interview
photo: Stan Barouh

In Private View, a couple who has compromised themselves into material comfort take Vanek on a bizarrely personal tour of their overdecorated apartment and supposedly wonderful lives. The couple's lady-doth-protest-too-much message, over and over, is that Vanek should be more like them. Again, Vanek says little, but it doesn't matter; the couple continue to project all of their doubts, self-hatred, and despair onto him.

Christopher Marshall, David Barlow, Emily Kron
Private View
photo: Stan Barouh

The third Havel play, and perhaps the best, is Protest. Vanek's old friend Stanekova, whom he hasn't seen in years, has summoned him to her comfortable home. Here again, comfort represents compromise. She is hoping to enlist him in a campaign to get her future son-in-law released from jail. As it happens, Vanek has been assembling signatures on a petition for just this reason. Naturally, he asks her to sign. But will she? She discusses the pros and cons at length, and is angered by Vanek's quietness, which she interprets as opprobrium; she, like the couple above, projects her self-criticism and guilt onto him.

Danielle Skraastad, David Barlow
Protest
photo: Stan Barouh

Protest is tough to watch because it invites the audience to consider what risks we would take--and, more to the point, wouldn't take--to fight injustice.

The evening ends with a brief Beckett play, Catastrophe, which Beckett dedicated to Havel. In a physicalization of powerlessness, the Vanek character is on a pedestal, silent, with no agency, as his body as moved about to please a director-dictator. It is powerful, although it is difficult to switch one's head from a Havel mode (largely representational theatre) to a Beckett mode (anything but).

Madeleine Ciocci, David Barlow, Emily Ballou
Catastrophe
photo: Stan Barouh

When I mentioned to a friend that I was going to this evening of plays, he joked that I was likely to have an edifying evening. And I did. The evening was also impressive and painful. To say it was thought-provoking is only accurate if you picture the thoughts as being elicited by ice-pick jabs to the brain and heart.

As usual with PTP/NYC, the pieces are well-acted. In particular, David Barlow does an amazing job spending most of the evening listening, which is no small feat.

The lighting (Hallie Zieselman) is outstanding, supporting and enhancing the mood of each piece. The excellent costumes are designed by Glenna Ryer, and the smart scenery by Mark Evancho.

Thanks once again to PTP/NYC for doing work that matters.

Wendy Caster
(fourth row, press ticket)

Happy Days

In the first act of Samuel Beckett's Happy Days, Winnie is buried up to her waist in a large mound of barren earth. In the second act, she is buried up to her neck. The mound of earth can be seen as life, or aging, or even just a mound of earth. No matter the interpretation, Winnie tries to make the best of it, carrying out her (limited) rituals, sharing her thoughts with a man we barely see whom she has clearly know for years (her husband? lover?), and being ever grateful when a day turns out to have a good moment or two. "Oh, this is a happy day," she says. She adds, "This will have been another happy day," as though to file it for the future when it will be a precious memory.

Brooke Adams
Photo: Joan Marcus

In the production currently at The Flea, directed by Andrei Belgrader and starring Brooke Adams and (her husband) Tony Shalhoub, Winnie chirps along, accentuating the positive and barely listening to her own words. Adams' performance is flat, with a largely monotonal presentation. She recites words rather than inhabiting them. (Full disclosure: the night I saw Happy Days, the audience gave Adams a standing ovation, so mine is clearly a minority opinion.)

[spoilers] 

The production as a whole doesn't listen to Beckett's words or else fails to examine the anguish behind them. It is a coarsened version of Happy Days, complete with masturbation and flying snot. Willie's reappearance at the end of act two is treated as slapstick rather than desperation. These decisions, while lessening the impact of the play, can be justified based on the text. Less justifiable is the moment when Winnie signals the audience to clap to try to entice Willie to sing. If Winnie is aware of the audience, than her isolation is considerably less isolated.

Waiting for Godot (Vartn af Godot)

Waiting for Godot is one of those masterpieces of modern drama that everyone has read or seen or, at the very least, picked up the basics of through cultural absorption. (If you have managed to make it to this point in your life without ever having heard a thing about the play, here you go: Two guys with memory issues wait around in a sort of dreamy, disconnected wasteland for someone named Godot. They meet two other memory-challenged guys who are locked in a real whopper of a power struggle, and the four of them all kill time together. Then there's an intermission, and pretty much the same things happen again in act II. At the end, the original two guys go back to waiting on their own. Godot never shows up.) Being the landmark that it is, Godot has been translated into many languages and gets staged an awful lot all around the world. Since it first showed up in New York City in 1956, Godot has been performed by Very Big Names. The Broadway premiere featured Burt Lahr and EG Marshall; a revival the following year starred Geoffrey Holder, Earle Hyman, and Mantan Moreland.

As if convinced that the show wouldn't click with....well, with anyone unless very famous men were in it (Becket wasn't cool with with the idea of women doing the show), producers seem to have made star-studded casts a requisite for any New York-based Godot revival. BAM staged it in the late 1970s with Sam Waterston, Austin Pendleton and Milo O'Shea. The Mike Nichols production at Lincoln Center in 1988 went simply balls out with megawatt famousness: it featured Robin Williams, Steve Martin, Bill Irwin, F. Murray Abraham, and Lukas Haas. In 2009, Nathan Lane, John Goodman, John Glover and Bill Irwin (again) took Godot on; just last fall, Ian McKellen, Patrick Stewart, Billy Crudup and Shuler Hensley appeared in yet another starry revival.

It occurred to me the other night, after agreeing to attend a performance of Godot in Yiddish at the tiny Barrow Street Theater in the West Village, that the play has been revived so frequently, and so fancily, that I've just never bothered to see it. I've read it, sure, but I've never seen one of the star-studded casts perform this monster masterwork about the tragicomic nature of human existence. My bad; it's just one of those shows, like King Lear or Grease, which shows up so often that I always figure I'll easily be able catch it the next time around.

The other thing that occurred to me--after I'd committed to a date and secured a ticket to the Yiddish version--that maybe my first time seeing Waiting for Godot should have been in a language that I actually understand.