Old Stories, Retold, Reveal New Truths
Recently, I saw the Czechoslovak-American Marionette Theatre’s short-lived but wonderful production of “Audience,” by the great Czech writer and statesman Václav Havel, at the Bohemian National Hall, on the Upper East Side. The play, which is semiautobiographical, depicts a writer named Ferdinand Vanek—a stand-in for Havel—who is consigned to working in a brewery after running afoul of the Communist regime. He engages in a long, comic, increasingly menacing conversation with the facility’s brewmaster, showing how even innocent-seeming language can be made to bend to the authoritarian Big Lie. Two performers, Vit Horejs and Theresa Linnihan—who also conceived the production—manipulated a battery of puppets, giving silent but substantial (often hilarious) form to the entire terrorized social world of the brewery. Through the fog of official obfuscation, this sly production seemed to say, the real story makes its way out in even the smallest gestures.
Here’s hoping that’s true. Stuck at a hinge in history, we’re cloaking ourselves in new fables, making desperate, wholesale attempts at self-reinvention through the slipperiness of stories. Voices like Havel’s, and like Karski’s—spiky with undigestible and often incommunicable truths—will have to keep struggling to be heard. ♦
Published in the print edition of the September 26, 2022, issue, with the headline “In the Retelling.”