Audience

By Vaclav Havel

Translated by Jan Novak

Directed by Robert A. Zick, Jr.

Assisted by Jennifer Daly

at the Eureka
215 Jackson Street, San Francisco

August 31-September 26, 2004

Audience, along with Unveiling and Protest, was published under the collective title of The Vanek Trilogy or Three Vanek Plays. Recently retired president of the Czech Republic, a former dissident imprisoned for four years by the Czechoslovak Communist regime, and champion of human rights, Vaclav Havel originally wrote Audience - an absurd encounter between a Brewmaster and his employee - for a gathering of fellow writers, all of whom had their work banned in their native countries. The protagonist of the play, Vanek, a dissident playwright, is not so much a person as a catalyst or filter; the character/principle Vanek has proved so appealing that other playwrights have since written their own Vanek plays. Havel says in his Forward: "The Vanek plays... are essentially not plays about Vanek, but plays about the world as it reveals itself when confronted by Vanek."