Word: vlasta
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Huml as played by Sam Baum '98, does not particularly deserve the audience's sympathy. Baum accentuates the self-absorption and cruelly noncommittal nature of Huml's character. Throughout the play he shows utter indifference to the pain of his wife Vlasta (Kathleen Conroy '98) and his mistress Renata (Jacquie Soohen), both of whom make the apparently unreasonable demand of a faithful relationship...
Huml gives Vlasta and Renata the same smug equivocations, displaying a strong attachment to neither character. But later, Huml attacks his secretary Blanka (Agnes Dunogue '98) in an explosion of sexual frustration. All this culminates in a dream-like scene in which the three women perform a dance around Huml. According to this production of the play, much of Huml's problem lies in his inability to choose a stable life and experience genuine love...
Hopkin's Huml is not a man of great introspection. As Dr. Balcar (Lyra O. Barrera) says of Pazook, "He doesn't know what's going on inside him." He is most chipper when he abuses his wife, Vlasta (Forbes), his mistress, Renata (Bina Martin), or his secretary, Blanka (Magda Hernandez). Witness the scene when, without a flinch or trace of anger, he asks Vlasta, "Will you stop speaking for all womankind and see about starting dinner...
What is truly frightening is that Havel intends Vlasta to speak for all of womankind, and for all of womankind to speak for Vlasta. Much of the humor of the work lies in Havel's recycling women's dialogue. The playwright has Huml's wife and mistress share catty, stereotypical lines. Forbes is a little flat as Vlasta, but Martin displays some nice comic timing as Renata...
...Friedländer, 46, now an Israeli historian, was a child of seven in Czechoslovakia at the outset of the war. His parents were nonpracticing Jews, and the religion that Pavel, as he was called, knew most about as a boy was the Roman Catholicism of his beloved governess Vlasta. It was this happenstance, perhaps, that made it possible for him to endure the enormous change in his life that occurred when he was ten. The family fled to France in 1939, but by the summer of 1942 they knew, as his mother wrote in a letter that has survived...