“Audience” at La Mama

Marcus David
March 2023

After the Velvet Revolution of 1989 I was one of many young Americans that went off to live in what was then Czechoslovakia. I was excited by the new democracy and the chance to live in a country where dissident playwright and author Vaclav Havel presided as the nation’s President. Prior to his rise to high office, Havel was a political prisoner and banned entirely from working in the theater. In 1974 he took a job at Krakonoš brewery in Trutnov, an experience he wrote about in his play Audience, presented February 2-19 at La Mama by Czechoslovak-American Marionette Theatre, translated and directed by Vit Horejs.

As part of this year’s Puppet Festival at La Mama, Audience brings together traditional puppetry with video projection, which uncannily conveys the surveillance Havel himself must have experienced under the Stb secret police during his time at the Krakonoš brewery. The dark humor and action of the play is contained in a cabinet of curiosities that gets rolled out as a beer barrel giving the production a surrealist edge that Czechs are well known for. During the course of the play the brewmeister character grotesquely swells up in size as he and Vaněk (a stand in for Havel himself) drink beer and discuss the goings on at at the brewery. Things take a turn for the absurd when Vaněk is asked to submit reports on himself written by himself to the brewmeister who would then in turn pass them on to the secret police. Such absurdities were common in Czech society following the suppression of the Prague Spring in 1968.

Audience left me longing those incredible years when President Havel was president. It is not so unusual for the one time powerless and imprisoned to be able to ascend to the high office in governments through history, but to get one who was a playwright, a dissident, and an artist with a political philosophy of anti-consumerism, humanitarianism, environmentalism, civil activism, and direct democracy is unusual. And to get one who counts among his friends Lou Reed and Frank Zappa is quite unusual

More on the Czechoslovak-American Marionette Theatre →

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