The LAVA Center is proud to present “Off the Shelf,” a play reading series of new classic plays, that will take place on Saturdays afternoons: August 12, 19, 26 and September 2 at 1 p.m.
The plays encompass a range of international, professional plays from the 1960s through the 1990s, and will be read by local actors.
Václav Havel holds several distinctions: last president of Czechoslovakia, first president of The Czech Republic, political prisoner and renowned playwright, memorist and essayist. The Memorandum was first written and produced in 1965 prior to Prague Spring and Havel’s arrest and imprisonment as a political dissident and subsequent leader of the first democratically elected government of his country. In The Memorandum, Havel peels away layers of implacable bureaucracy to poke fun at the absurdity and the venality of Soviet-style communism and the well-founded anxieties of the people who did their best to get along in spite of it. The play centers around the sudden introduction of a new inter-office language, Ptydepe, mandated and lauded as scientific and efficient. Of course, it is anything but. And of course, there will eventually be a new absurd mandated language to replace it.
There is an optional, $5–10 suggested donation for each performance, to help The LAVA Center continue to offer free and affordable programming.
