About the Show

PTP/NYC (Potomac Theatre Project) presents an evening of five serio-comic one act plays from master playwrights Harold Pinter, Václav Havel, and Samuel Beckett.

From the show:

In Audience, Private View, and Protest, the dissident Vaněk (Havel’s alter ego) encounters people trapped by the moral dilemmas inherent in a Communist system. The trio of plays is bookended by Harold Pinter’s New World Order and Samuel Beckett’s Catastrophe, the latter written in tribute to Havel.

The Vaněk plays (along with all of Havel’s work) were banned in Czechoslovakia, but that didn’t prevent people from performing them in their living rooms, copying them surreptitiously as samizdat (illegal, faded copies of banned work), or even recording them on vinyl.

Critic Reviews (5)

"A Vaclav Havel Trilogy Drives Evening of Political Theater. 'Havel: The Passion of Thought,' along with work by Harold Pinter and one by Samuel Beckett (dedicated to Havel), takes on morality and tyranny."
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"Truth As the Immoral Fibre of Being in 'HAVEL: THE PASSION OF THOUGHT' at Atlantic Stage 2"
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"A handful of mini-plays honors Vaclav Havel."
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"That 'Havel: the Passion of Thought' still has much to say to us after 45 years says a great deal about the state of the world and human rights today. However, Richard Romagnoli fails to do justice to the plays by using the same flat style with all five."
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"A sporadically interesting, though somewhat flat, theatrical experience, that, despite the horrific political situation in this country today, never manages to feel particularly engaged or relevant."
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Cast and creative team

Potomac Theatre Project