Taper Protest Honors Havel and His Work

Four hundred people came to the Mark Taper Forum Monday night to protest the imprisonment of Czech playwright Vaclav Havel.

They left realizing that, even behind bars, Havel remains a free man.

Havel, 52, is Czechoslovakia’s leading playwright and foremost dissident. He has been in jail three times since 1968. On Jan. 16 he was again arrested in Prague on a charge of “hooliganism.”

He and 13 others were taking part in a demonstration in Wenceslaus Square honoring a Czech student who had immolated himself there 20 years ago as a protest against the Soviet presence. (It was announced Wednesday that Havel will be tried separately from his colleagues; family sources said he was due to stand trial Tuesday.)

The Taper knows Havel best through his scripts. It staged his “A Private View” in 1984 and his “Largo Desolato” in 1987, each a doleful, funny look at the way people adjust their principles to accommodate the political realities of the moment.

There has also been some contact with Havel the man. The Taper’s artistic director, Gordon Davidson, told Monday’s audience about having lunch with him in Prague last summer. “But what do people think of my plays ?” Havel wanted to know. Davidson handed him his answer: an award from the Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle for “Largo Desolato.”

Robin Gammell and Dakin Matthews re-created a scene from that play Monday night--the one where a dissident’s friend (Matthews) finds it his painful duty to chide the dissident (Gammell) for having fallen off recently in his role as a role model. “How will we keep up our courage,” Matthews sighs, “if you crack?”

Gammell sighs, a common reaction for a Havel hero. He can’t bring himself to point out that Matthews is speaking from a condition of safety, about 10 miles behind the battle line, while he, Gammell, is out there taking the heat. In any case, this is irrelevant. The charge is either true or untrue. Oh, dear. It’s probably true. Something else to worry about.

Havel’s comedy is that of the tender conscience faced with the tough choice and either making it or backing away. Either way, as we saw Monday, it’s funny. For instance Raye Birk and Richard Jordan re-created the delicious scene in “A Private View” where Birk humbly asks Jordan, a prosperous novelist, to sign a petition against the jailing of a folk singer. Jordan spends the next 20 minutes convincing himself that, despite appearances, the best thing he can do for the singer is not sign the petition.

Jordan then bawls out Birk for condemning this as a morally expedient decision. Not that Birk has said a word. But Jordan knows what he’s thinking!

These scenes don’t come from the agitprop world of brave resistance fighters and fiendish government officials. They’re about nice people with kids in college. An American can’t see a Havel play without realizing that if it did happen here, this is how it would happen--a process of business as usual, with nothing that you can’t adjust to.

Unless you’re some kind of crank. Monday’s program, arranged by the Taper’s Jessica Teich, kept going back to the letters that Havel wrote to his wife Olga the last time he was in prison, from 1979-83, on a charge of “subversion.”

These were read by Barbara Babcock, Christina Pickles and John Malkovich. Again, the listener was struck by their mildness. Havel seems the quintessential observer here, exploring a situation as assiduously as Henry James. A prison visit from his wife is revealed to have been deeply satisfactory in that nothing remarkable was said or felt--proof that the two could be at home with each other still.

Likewise, a jail cell is proof that a man “has not run for the fire exit”--has not accommodated. In that case, Havel assures his wife, he is where he is supposed to be.

“We are saving your space for you, dear friend,” Arthur Miller wrote at the time. Actor Michael Gross read Miller’s piece distinguishing between the ad writers of this world and the truth writers, like Havel. And Carl Lumbly read Miller’s note on Havel’s new jailing, with its ironic lead: “I remember when the Czechs were our contemporaries . . . . “

That picked up on the note of shock that has gone around the theater world at Havel’s arrest during the era of glasnost . An earlier rally was held on Havel’s behalf at New York’s Public Theatre, and doubtless others will be held in London and other cities. This is a world-class playwright caught, as Miller put it, in “the war against the imagination.”

Coordinated by the Taper’s Madeline Puzo--Puzo’s farewell to the Taper: she is about to join the staff of the Guthrie Theatre--the evening closed with a reminder that P.E.N. and Amnesty International are protesting the arrest of Havel and his colleagues.

Mako read a letter from P.E.N. and Amnesty’s regional director David Hinkley recommending that the audience join the protest by sending an airmail letter to the president of Czechoslovakia. Address: Judr. Gustav Husak, Prezident CSSR, Praha-Hrad, Czechoslovakia. A foreign airmail stamp costs 45 cents.