The Potomac Theater Project offers one of its strongest, most blistering evenings in its 12 years in Washington with, "Havel: The Passion of Thought," a "compilation" by artistic director Richard Romagnoli. Inaugurating Olney Theater's Mulitz-Gudelsky Theater Lab, the show -- first produced in 1991 at Middlebury College where Romagnoli is a professor - profits from the clean austerity of the high-ceilinged, wood-paneled black box space.
As designed by Adam Magazine, who is also responsible for the sensitive lighting, the stage is surrounded on three sides by tiers of risers accommodating audience members so attentive that at the show I attended, the majority stayed for an after-play discussion conducted by Romagnoli and Peter Slevin, Washington Post Eastern European correspondent between 1984-1992. The show's greatest asset is actor Christopher Lane in the role of Ferdinand Vanek, a semi-autobiographical character in the trio of plays by Vaclav Havel, President of the Czech Federal Republic. Romagnoli claims no credit for inspiring Lane in the mute eloquence of his mostly reactionary role, as Vanek, newly released from his term as a political prisoner, tries to resume his life.
In Audience, he is forced to socialize with his boss at the Brewery, where he has traded his pre-prison occupation as playwright for a survival gig of rolling kegs. As portrayed by James Matthew Ryan, the Brewmaster, initially a bullying figure, is betrayed by his humanity to tears, begging Vanek to bring a popular actress to him for one night's pleasure, so he can justify his existence. In Private View, old friends Michael and Vera (a jovial Tyson Lien and vivacious Michole Biancosino) beg for Vanek's approval of their relatively swank living accommodations, won by making deals with the totalitarian devil, so to speak. The versatile Ryan trades the tattered clothes of the Brewmaster for tailored trousers to play Vanek's former colleague, Stanek, who cannot risk signing Vanek's petition in Protest.
Preceding the Vaclav plays is Harold Pinter's New World Order, in which a black-hooded figure (Lane) is tormented by Desmond and Lionel (Alexander Cranmer and Peter Makrauer), two well-dressed thugs representing a brutal regime. "He hasn't got any idea what we're going to do with him," one suggests. "Or his wife," says the other. "Don't forget his wife." And in the concluding, powerful Catastrophe, a seven-minute-play authored by Samuel Beckett in honor of Havel, a Director (Frank Wildermann) instructs his Assistant Director (Malaya Drew) to display on a block the brutalized, black-hooded Protagonist (Lane), who in front of a full-house (in the script as well as real life), triumphantly defies their machinations to proudly raise his head in the golden light provided by Adam Magazine.
