JORDAN DIRECTS CZECH BLACK COMEDY

Richard Jordan is not a gentle interview. An uninformed question provokes a curt response, a thematic detour nets a baleful stare, the hourlong time appropriation is adhered to in businesslike fashion. Yet when it comes to delivering the theatrical goods, Jordan does.

The Harvard-educated actor/director is staging Czechoslovakian playwright Vaclav Havel’s “Largo Desolato” (opening Friday at Taper, Too), the seriocomic story of a philosophy professor waiting in fear for the secret police, presumably coming to torture and imprison him for his writings.

“It’s an Eastern European play in which the humor is not readily available,” noted Jordan (whose introduction to Havel came with his Obie-winning performance in “A Private View” at New York’s Public Theatre, a role he later reprised at Taper, Too). “I mean, it’s not Neil Simon. It’s not gags. It’s black comedy.

“You see, the Eastern-European playwright is writing in a society which does not permit him to speak the truth--and frequently doesn’t even permit him to mention facts everyone knows. It’s of the same revolutionary quality, for instance, as Solzhenitsyn’s ‘A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.’ What was completely lost on the West was that it was the first time anything had ever appeared in print about the concentration camps in the Soviet Union.

“Everyone knew they were there, that people had been sent to them--but no one had ever been permitted to put it down on paper. It’s as if, in this country, no one ever mentioned racial segregation.” Jordan (last seen on screen as a crazed killer baiting reporter Kurt Russell in 1985’s “The Mean Season”) paused to chew on a bite of his salad.

“What you have is someone writing in a society where there are unmentionables. Now, the problem for Western audiences is that we don’t know what those are; we don’t know if he’s breaking the rules or not. And frequently, the playwright will write a play in which the given circumstance is never mentioned.

“In this play, for instance, the character is under threat of being hauled off to prison. But he never talks about it as prison, never refers to what might happen to him. All he says is that he thinks about going ‘there.’ He says maybe ‘they’ will come and take him ‘there’ because he’s written ‘that.’

“So there’s a sort of iconography that the European playwright uses which (his) audience understands immediately. And I guess that’s part of the problem of directing (such a) play for a Western audience: to make those things real and accessible--something people can see and say, ‘I don’t understand the situation completely, but I recognize that it is human.’ ”

In spite of translation (by Tom Stoppard, who is part Czech) and the Americanization of the characters’ names, Jordan believes that the veracity of Havel’s play won’t be obscured.

“It’s in the playing, the tone, the style of his writing. You can’t deny it. If you read somebody like Franz Kafka (also a Czech), as you get into his world, you extend yourself into it. You become more and more familiar with (what) he’s talking about. And as you become familiar with the vocabulary he uses, you become sucked in by the mood.

“The same thing happens in this play. You don’t present it all at once; that’s like a black wall, hard to penetrate. I think (its) accessibility is in not diluting (that foreign) reality, but presenting it slowly, so that we can get sucked into it. You begin to understand the situation, then you begin to understand the characters in human terms. You don’t know about the gulag, but you know about fear.”

And evil. “The banality of evil,” he stressed. “Here, a man lives in fear of some sort of political persecution--and that’s enough. They don’t need to do anything, they don’t need to throw him in jail. They can just leave him in a room in terror about what might happen.”

His overview of Havel’s themes?

“That the world isn’t going to end with a bang, but a whimper. There’s no possibility for heroism. Everyone’s just sort of muddling through, making compromises that they don’t even know about. I think most people carry that (legacy) around. Look at the guy who does a job for 40 years that he doesn’t like. His compensation is making money. But then he’s too old to enjoy the money, or it’s already spent.

“Havel’s view is pessimistic,” he agreed. “Yes, I’m sharing it now--I have to do this.” And otherwise?

Jordan allowed himself a rare laugh. “Well, I’m not a (native) Californian, so maybe I am a pessimist. People here grow up not expecting a bitter cold winter. I mean, it’s nine below zero in New York state. That influences your expectations. I carry that with me to the extent that I don’t ever have to worry about becoming a California airhead. ‘

“But I don’t relish it,” he added hastily. “That’s why I moved here 15 years ago. I go there if I have a job, but whenever I can, I hop on a plane and rush back here. There are a lot of (former) New Yorkers here, but I don’t know many who really like California as much as I do. I’m an outdoors kind of person, anyway. So I live out in the country (in Malibu, with his actress wife Blair Brown). I’ve got a garden, I grow flowers--and in the back of my mind, I get ready for the big change: the earthquake.”

Jordan smiled suddenly. “Well, here we go. In this play, a guy is also waiting for an ‘earthquake’--spending his days sitting in his room, waiting for someone to take him away. It’s the same burlesque.”