A Captive Audience, Playwright Misses Opening Night

--The play’s the thing, but with the two one-act plays of Czechoslovak playwright Vaclav Havel currently being staged in Warsaw, there’s added drama. Film maker Feliks Falk, who is directing “The Audience” and “The Protest,” which depict man’s struggle against authority, said that rehearsals began in January and that Havel had been invited to attend the opening over the weekend. However, Havel, whose plays are prohibited in Czechoslovakia, could not attend, because he is serving a nine-month sentence in a Prague prison for inciting citizens to participate in a banned demonstration and obstructing police officers. “It’s just a coincidence that Havel is in prison. For us and for the actors, of course, the performance is very important because of Havel,” Falk said. Havel’s plays had been banned in Poland since 1981, when authorities declared martial law. But displaying the new sense of accommodation in Poland today, Prime Minister Mieczyslaw F. Rakowski attended the opening performance--sitting five rows away from Adam Michnik, a leading Polish opposition activist.

--Army Sgt. Lee Nelson is getting a lot of attention these days--and he’s not liking it. He says he’ll quit the service, “if they let me.” But it’s not because of a problem. Nelson’s desire to become a civilian stems from a windfall--he’s won Lotto America’s top prize of $16 million, the most ever won since the game began in 1987. Stationed at the Pentagon, Nelson, 29, said winning the lottery hasn’t changed his routine. “I got up, went to work, spent my lunch hour at the gym, came home and had dinner,” he said. Nelson, whose enlistment is up June 5, said he fears the notoriety more than anything. Besides the District of Columbia, states in Lotto America are Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Oregon, Rhode Island and West Virginia.

--For breakfast, it will be coffee and stale bread. For lunch, bread, vegetable soup and water. Not a very nourishing diet for university students. But to those at the University of Dayton, Ohio, it will be the diet of choice. This week, a group of collegians will get a firsthand look at life on campus streets, as seen through the eyes of the homeless--queuing up in soup kitchen lines for their meager meals. Sister Nancy Bramlage, coordinator of the University of Dayton’s Office of Justice, Peace and Community Outreach, said: “What we want to do is first of all raise the awareness of students that there is the growing problem in the United States with the homeless and also give them a little bit of an experience of what it must be like--even to a tiny extent--to be homeless.”