Václav Havel's "Protest"
Bricolage Production Company's Production Expertly Dramatizes Playwright and Statesman's Words and Ideas
(Note: This review includes some “spoilers” of the play.)
Recently, I had the privilege to attend a performance of Václav Havel’s play Protest. One of Havel’s Vaněk plays, the production was directed by Jeffrey Carpenter and featured Robert Anthony Peters (Vaněk) and Steven Schub (Staněk). Staged in a lovely private residence atop a hill overlooking the city, the play is set in Soviet-ruled Czechoslovakia in the 1970s. The set replicates the somewhat plush home of Staněk, a writer who compromises with the Soviet regime, writing for state television. More details on the production are below (including opportunities to help stage it in the future).
Václav Havel (1936-2011) rose to fame in his native Czechoslovakia in the 1960s as a playwright. His first major work was The Garden Party (1963). He became one of the leaders of the liberty movement when Czechoslovakia was under Soviet control, and his plays were banned in the country for many years. Dissidents staged clandestine, samizdat performances of his plays in homes and other private spaces. His quondam friend, novelist Milan Kundera, left for Paris and criticized Havel, who easily could have left for New York or elsewhere, for pointless and dangerous martyrdom—a form of what today would be called “virtue signaling”. Havel spent extended periods in prison, but he loved his country and refused to leave it, resolved to staying and fighting. Kundera was best known for the novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and his feud with Havel inspired part of The Unbearable Lightness of Being and at least one of Havel’s plays. Havel was a lifelong fan of Frank Zappa, and his fellow dissidents included musicians like The Plastic People of the Universe, a band inspired by Zappa’s Mothers of Invention composition “Plastic People”. (I performed the song at an “open mic” night in Pennsylvania many years ago.) Havel was an architect of Charter 77 (1977), a key document in the Czech freedom movement. Havel was incarcerated at the time. It was around this time that he outlined his play Protest in his prison cell.
Havel was a key figure in the nonviolent Velvet Revolution that overthrew the Soviets in 1989, and he was elected the last president of Czechoslovakia in 1989. After Slovakia seceded from the country, he became the first president of the Czech Republic in 1993. He invited Zappa to advise him. So impressed was Havel by pro-capitalist Zappa’s ideas for market reforms that Havel announced that Zappa had become an official representative to the country on trade, tourism, and cultural issues. Unfortunately, then-U.S. Secretary of State James Baker intervened. Baker’s wife was a co-founder (along with Tipper Gore) of the Parents’ Music Resource Center in 1985, a controversial organization Zappa testified against in Congress. The Czech government caved, and Zappa never became a formal advisor or negotiator.
Protest is one of “The Vaněk Plays”. Havel wrote three plays in the 1970s with an autobiographical writer character named Vaněk. Like Havel, Vaněk was a writer and sometime political prisoner who worked in a brewery. Also like Havel, he is an intransigent dissident who will not compromise with the Communist regime.
Recently, the Bricolage Production Company produced all three Vaněk plays. Based in Pittsburgh, Bricolage, led by co-artistic directors Carpenter and Tami Dixon, specializes in immersive theater experiences where the audience can feel like they are part of the drama. They hold a discussion with the audience and actors after every performance, debating the play’s theme and implications. They also recreated the Samizdat experience, sending ticket holders the private location of the performance only just before the performance date and asking each a series of questions, including whether they were followed to the location. (Frankly, the country comes across more like those dark totalitarian days with almost every passing year.)
I attended one of the four performances of Protest (first produced in 1978) on the evening of Saturday, June 6, officially titled Samizdat: Play #3 in accordance with the recreation of the samizdat atmosphere. (It was the third and final production of Bricolage’s Vaněk Play series.) Directed by Carpenter, the one-act, two-role play featured Peters as Vaněk and my friend Steven Schub as Staněk. (I was a fan long before we met. To date, he is the only guest writer at this page.) There were performances the previous two evenings and one final performance the following afternoon.
Protest is a complex play. It is set at the fairly prosperous home of Staněk, another writer who decides to deal with the Communist regime in the antipodal manner of his openly and outspokenly rebellious companion Vaněk. He compromises and works on state television productions, delivering content congenial to the regime and avoiding confrontation. Vaněk visits him shortly after being released from prison. Staněk asks him about his time in prison, and the contrast between the experiences and fortunes of the two is palpable. Staněk even criticizes Vaněk’s defiance, telling him he talked in that prison more than necessary. At one point, the two discuss an imprisoned dissident popular singer named Javůrek. Staněk’s daughter is expecting a child with him. Staněk had invited Vaněk to write something on behalf of Javůrek, and Vaněk presents him with an already written petition for his release which he asks him to sign. Staněk responds with a prolix monologue in which he considers the reasons to sign or not to sign the petition, deliberating over the potential effects of each decision in an impassioned attempt at justifying his ultimate decision—continuing his quiet, clandestine activity of working within the system, trying to use his influence and connections behind the scenes to affect change. He refuses to sign the petition, appealing to the safety of his children (he also has a son). The phone rings, and Staněk learns that Javůrek has been released without the petition. Vaněk responds that Staněk’s machinations within the system worked in Javůrek’s favor. The play ends with silent tension, Staněk affecting bonhomie and rationalizing his behavior and the congenial Vaněk voicing agreement. Vaněk expresses relief that they had not written the petition a few days earlier as the regime would have stubbornly refused to release Javůrek; Staněk replies that there is always a chance one can do more harm than good. The cast subtly and skillfully dramatizes the complex, strained relationship between the two. In Havel’s writing, the specific thoughts and feelings of each character are ambivalent and open to some debate, but there is an impression of significant silent tension. There is ambiguity in the play though less, I think, than some readers and viewers state.
Experiencing Bricolage’s production is incomparably more revelatory than merely reading Havel’s play. It is truly immersive, as if the viewer were the metaphorical fly on the wall in Staněk’s house, and the thespians embody their characters appropriately, reifying their conflict more than is possible from the most careful, repeated reading. Peters’s Vaněk is laconic and understated while Schub’s Staněk is intense and feverish. Different readers and viewers react to Staněk’s compromises and justifications for those compromises differently, as was evident in the discussion Peters led after the performance. Some think that Staněk is a dishonest poltroon evading the consequences of his actions. Others consider the dilemma hopelessly complicated. My view is essentially the former. Staněk, if not quite a villain, is certainly an antagonist to the more heroic Vaněk, enabling the regime, and there is no question that his justifications are rationalizing more than they are rational. Parenthood does complicate things, and being a dissident or contrarian, even in a relatively free country, can have consequences for one’s children. (Ask Mark Steyn, or George Carlin or even Frank Zappa when they were alive.) But enabling a despotic regime can have disastrous long term consequences for those children—and for the parent.
During the post-show discussion, Schub pointed out the long term implications of these decisions with one (realistic) example from fiction and one from history. In the play, the characters mention a mutual friend named Pavel Landovský. Landovský was a real playwright and actor who wrote his own Vaněk play. In his play, Staněk ends up in an insane asylum. The real Havel eventually became president of a liberated Czechoslovakia.
According to Schub, “Protest is more than a political play; it is a philosophical and deeply moral one whose theme is the price of cowardice. The protest itself—the petition—is merely a symbol, a metaphor. And though the meaning of the play’s climax might seem ambiguous, or perhaps even cynical, at first glance, there are two relevant facts that I think provide fuller context.
“Havel’s best friend, the actor Pavel Landovský, wrote a kind of sequel to Protest called Closed for Disinfection. In that play, my character, Staněk, has been sent to a mental institution—my guess is as a result of his obsessive evasions and the psychological agony of his total self-betrayal. Meanwhile, Vaněk, in real life (a.k.a. Václav Havel himself), goes on to become President of the Czech Republic.
“The message, to me, is clear, and it reminds me of a quote by the philosopher and novelist Ayn Rand, a woman who, like Havel, experienced life under a Communist dictatorship: ‘I am not brave enough to be a coward. I see the consequences too clearly.’
“I know that is a sentiment Havel himself would endorse. Vaněk lives it, Staněk fails to, and both reap what they have sown. Thus, Protest serves as both a warning and an inspiration.”
If one has the opportunity, seeing—or even helping produce—Bricolage Production Company’s Protest is emphatically recommended.
Thanks to Jeffrey Carpenter, Tami Dixon, Robert Anthony Peters, and Steven Schub
Bricolage Production Company website:
bricolagepgh.org
Robert Anthony Peters website:
robertanthonypeters.com
Steven Schub website:
stevenschub.com
Note: Bricolage aims to bring this production of Protest to schools, universities, theaters, conferences, dinner parties, and living rooms across the world. If you are interested in bringing Protest to a venue of any kind, please contact Jeffrey Carpenter at: jeff@bricolagepgh.org