Word: havelent
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...Vaclav Havel once asked, "is not Franz Kafka, one of the most serious and tragic authors of this century, at the same time a humorist?" I think that whoever does not laugh when reading his novels...does not understand them." Havel's 1984 play, "Largo Desolato: A Play in Seven Scenes," presents the comic and hauntingly Kafkaesque world of Professor Leopold, a philosopher who has gotten into "trouble" for expounding on "intellectual hooliganism" in a recent treatise...
With a poisonous dose of theatrical hooliganism, the Havard-Radcliffe Summer Theater's "Largo Desolate" achieves fluency with Havel, if not with Havel's Kafka. While the stage antics often supersede the play's riveting psychological uncertainy, this intelligent and riotously satiric production, directed by Brad Rouse, articulates much of the literary intensity with which Havel composed Largo in only four days...
...Adapting Havel's staging to the Loeb Ex, Rouse employs the small performance space to enhance the "stifling" claustrophobia of the living room setting. Surrounding the living room with a set of five doors, each leading to some degree of unknown or off-stage humour, the set designer (David Gammons) draws on the powerful effects of the drama's rhetorical structure to approximate the closed-in, yet exposed psyche of Leopold...
...director manages to retain much of Havel's opening, substituting effective lighting design for Havel's curtain (in the script, the opening has two false starts, each cut off by an abrupt curtain), and the dramatic opening acquaints us intimately with the chilling instability of Professor Leopold (Ian Lithgow...
Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, facing tight budgets and possible shutdown since the end of the Cold War, may breathe easier thanks to Czech President Vaclav Havel. Last night, President Clinton accepted Havel's offer to house the broadcasters in the former Czechoslovakian parliament building in Prague -- rent-free. The stations, based in Munich for four decades, said the move would shore up their 1,500 employees' morale, but TIME State Department correspondent J.F.O. McAllister says few really want to leave their comfortable German surroundings. The Czechs, he adds, are only too happy to import a prestigious Western operation...