STAGE REVIEW : ‘A Private View’ That Would Have Pleased Havel

One of the most indelible images of Czechoslovakia’s “Velvet Revolution,” which swept away the cobwebs of Stalinism and brought on center stage playwright Vaclav Havel, was the new President Havel watching the first non-clandestine Czech performance of his one-act, “Audience.”

The piece, about a big lug of a brewmaster trying to dominate Vanek, a dissident playwright condemned to forced labor at a brewery, was already layered with ironies, but now even the title carried a joke: Havel had finally gained his audience.

Coincidentally, Havel was visiting Los Angeles last Friday when we dropped by Theatre IgLoo to see “A Private View,” his comic triptych that begins with “Audience.” Havel, now playing the overbooked head of state and tied up elsewhere, was not in the audience. (Producer Dan Piburn said he and and his group, the Company, formerly of the fire-damaged Stella Adler Theatre and now in residence at IgLoo, did briefly meet with Havel earlier that day.)

Had he been able to clear his calendar, Havel might have been very pleased.

There is a touch of affected stridency in the early phases of each piece (“A Private View” and “Protest” fill out the trilogy), mostly from the actors playing opposite Anthony Cistaro’s quiet Vanek. Tim McNeil’s maltster, Bonnie Laufer’s and Gerry Donato’s wanna-be-Yankee couple in “View” and Milton Justice’s turncoat TV hack in “Protest” struggle a bit negotiating Havel’s tricky subtleties. With each acquaintance, Vanek ultimately comes up against frightening archness hiding a frightened, repressed psyche, but it’s an archness that shouldn’t spill over into the performances.

Soon though, under Justice’s direction in the first two pieces, and Mark Donnelly’s in the last, they settle down and find Havel’s morally gray tones coloring a world where there are no devils or saints. Instead, there’s something worse, and more comic: Equivocators, small-minded people chafing under a totalitarian system. Instead of lashing out, they reserve their wrath for the system’s critics.

Vanek, for instance. (So emblematic was he of the Czech artist that he was adopted and put into five other plays by Havel’s fellow playwrights.) He is Havel’s alter-ego, but Havel undermines him every step of the way, though more subtly than he treated his author figure in his erratic “Temptation.”

Here, Vanek resists the brewmaster’s offer to spy. He turns down the couple’s material enticements. He nearly convinces the TV hack to sign a protest petition. But his heroic stance is upset by human factors and events he can’t control. He can’t make the revolution by himself, and he seems to privately laugh at his own predicament.

At least, that’s the impression deeply made by Cistaro. Clothed in worn-out tweeds, Cistaro’s Vanek knows how far to push and how to use his impeccably good manners to keep his worst thoughts to himself. Especially in the “Audience” and “Protest” dialogues, Cistaro suggests a man almost in shock at the ridiculous battle of wills he finds himself in. And that this battle could happen in places far from Czechoslovakia.

“A Private View,” Theatre IgLoo, 6543 Santa Monica Blvd. Hollywood, Thursdays-Sundays, 8 p.m. Ends Dec. 1. $12; (213) 962-3771. Running time: 2 hours, 10 minutes.