Word: haveles
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Leopold has been psychologically destroyed by his work, like the man in Havel's essay, "An Anatomy of Reticence," who experiences "the first moment of deterioration...when [his] artefact, [his] project for a better world, begins to expropriate his responsibility and identify, when the abstraction ceases to belong to him and he instead begins to belong...
...Lithgow presents a Leopold acquiescent to self-destruction, Rouse demands a more complex interpretation, reading Havel's play as a study in tragic hilarity. Rouse goes a fair distance to portray the outside world from which Leopold is excluded, transforming Lucy (Jessica Walling), Leopold's unrequited mistress, into a lascivious lover who must compete with the male "friend" Bertram, for the professor's attention, and juxtaposing the confused living room existence of the actual drama with cascades off-stage laughter between Leopold's friends, Suzana (Jessica Fortunato) and Edward (Thomas Parks...
...medicine cabinet, we are unsure whether he runs to the bathroom to get the drugs out of his system or vomit quantities of banal expressions. The dramatic risk is that, trampled under the recylced rhetoric of the world around him, Lithgow loses the innermost psychological tension of the play. Havel's subtle development (or un-development) of Leopold's character evades Lithgow, who remains confined by the circularity of the plays gestures and language...
...Havel reads extremely well in translation, and neither Tom Stoddard's English version nor Rouse's production lose the author's nascent sarcasm. Fraught with cliche, the play seems to make fun of the postmodern genre it places itself in; in Rouse's interpretation, the language surfaces with such hollow force that we can easily imagine that Leopold's books must read like the non sensical phrases of the artist/critic Mark Tansey's "Wheel...
Ultimately, if it falls short of the more profound psychodrama Havel may have been getting at, Rouse's production succeed's on a lighter plain, in the genre of self-ironic comedy...