The Garden Party

Went to an interesting event the other night. Anyone here familiar with a guy named Vaclav Havel? (pronounced Vas-lav, with an ‘s’ sound) Long story short, he’s a Czech playwright who was imprisoned by the communist government for the subtle but noticeable anti-communist subtexts of his plays. However, after the fall of communism, he ends up becoming the first President of the Czech Republic. He’s here at Columbia this semester as a scholar-in-residence.
I hadn’t been previously familiar with his work myself, but our Lit Hum class is covering one of his plays, The Garden Party, in our class. So this last Saturday, we went to a production of the play at Miller Theater, the on-campus performing arts theatre. And it was … very interesting.
The play wasn’t really a play per se, it was just a reading of the play; you can see all the actors in the picture, and they just remained seating in their chairs reading the play from notebooks. This made it somewhat less impressive than it might otherwise have been, especially given that this play is very much theatre of the absurd, so the lack of the props written into the play itself did detract from the performance. However, hearing people read the play and watching them interact did help the play make more sense than it did when I read it beforehand; some of the dialog is very circular and absurdist, so it’s hard to get a sense of what’s being conveyed. The reading did help with that.
The play was optional for my class, but I decided to go, and afterwards our instructor Professor Muller and the rest of us went and had coffee and talked about our impressions. I’ll make a separate note on that class some time, it’s really an amazing group, and we had a good time together that evening.
Oh, and by the way, yes, that is in fact Dustin Hoffman in the picture, fourth from the left (blue shirt drinking the bottle of water) Everyone was very excited that he was in it, but I have to admit, his performance was a bit lackluster. He didn’t seem to be trying very hard, or putting himself into the reading much. Everyone agreed over coffee that several of the other actors did much better jobs. But, it was cool to get a chance to see him.