Note to Havel: Skip This 'Memorandum' FINAL Edition

Rick Davis's production of the play, which just opened at Theater of the First Amendment, relocates the story to a contemporary American setting. For audiences that have never had the pleasure of living in a police state, the effect is like listening to a symphony played on the edge of your hea...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inThe Washington post
Main Author Triplett, Bill
Format Newspaper Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Washington, D.C WP Company LLC d/b/a The Washington Post 13.09.1999
Subjects
Davis, Rick
Havel, Vaclav (1936-2011)
Theater
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Summary:Rick Davis's production of the play, which just opened at Theater of the First Amendment, relocates the story to a contemporary American setting. For audiences that have never had the pleasure of living in a police state, the effect is like listening to a symphony played on the edge of your hearing range. You catch all the big stuff, but none of the richly detailed nuance that gives the piece its real character. (Vaclav) Havel's jokes and themes, so resonant in the original setting, end up sounding glib. Like Karl Capek--another Czech who wrote nonrealistic parables, and whose play "R.U.R." is also running in Washington at the moment-- Havel is concerned with dehumanization and conformity. That much of "The Memorandum" translates readily for any culture familiar with the mind-numbing qualities of bureaucracy. But Havel's bureaucracy is an extension of a repressive political regime that crushes souls arbitrarily and always for its own sake. This is the broader context that makes the plot more than an intellectual sitcom.
ISSN:0190-8286