LARGO DESOLATO
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The new internationalism is making our illusions difficult to maintain, however. Like it or not, we now know that South African housewives watch movies on their VCRs, and that Neil Simon is one of the most popular American playwrights in the Soviet Union. What has always been obvious to those who have lived or traveled extensively overseas will become more and more apparent stateside as well–that not all artists respond in the same way to the same environmental factors, and that not all literature created under a state of censorship has a hidden antiestablishment message. So I wonder how Vaclav Havel’s Largo Desolato would be received by Americans if we didn’t know that its Czech author was once a dissident writer imprisoned by the Communist government and is currently president of Czechoslovakia? What if this play had been quietly slipped into some new playwrights’ competition somewhere? How much of what we read into Havel’s play is colored by his current star power and our own xenophilia?
Such questions must remain moot, however. Blind Parrot Productions has chosen to emphasize the play’s political ramifications: a press release promises “an emotional exploration of political oppression and personal obligation,” a display in the lobby details events in Havel’s and Czechoslovakia’s histories, and quotations from Havel’s February 1990 address to the U.S. Congress are sprinkled throughout both. We’re led to expect a work in which drably uniformed wardens recite long, solemn speeches in impeccable Masterpiece Theatre accents.
Or could Leopold’s agony be a monumental case of writer’s block? During such episodes of creative paralysis, all writers contemplate giving up their mission and returning to comfortable anonymity. I lean toward this last interpretation–not only do the characters behave exactly as Leopold says his thoughts behave, but in their speech they drop pronouns just as we all do in our internal monologues–it’s as though Leopold were talking to himself. (David Perkins’s director’s notes offer little assistance, only further jumbling together Havel’s play, Beckett’s play, Havel’s life, and Eastern European history.) Clearly the questions here are whether to continue or surrender, to walk or merely talk, to be or not to be–but anything more than these is left to the viewer to decide in his or her own way.
