The LAVA Center is proud to present “Off the Shelf,” a play reading series of new classic plays.
The plays encompass a range of international, professional plays from the 1960s through the 1990s, and will be read by local actors.
There is an optional, $5–10 suggested donation for each performance, to help The LAVA Center continue to offer free and affordable programming.
the schedule:
The Memorandum
by Václav Havel
Saturday, Aug. 12, 1 p.m.
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.
True West
by Sam Shepard
Saturday, Aug. 19, 1 p.m.
Sam Shepard’s plays are known for their bleak, poetic, surrealist elements, black comedy and rootless characters living on the outskirts of American society. True West, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1983, is about the sibling rivalry between two estranged brothers who have reconnected. It is also an exploration of how we live and succeed (or don’t) in a demanding, dehumanizing society: Which brother is more “in touch” with life, the one who’s been living on the desert, essentially off the grid, or the one who watches the news and drives the freeway every day — and which one is more satisfied with his life?
Spinning into Butter
by Rebecca Gilman
Saturday, Aug. 26, 1 p.m.
Join us for a cold table reading of Rebecca Gilman’s Spinning Into Butter — a searing, comic expose of political correctness at a small Vermont college that continues to provoke heated conversations about racism in America today. The reading will be followed by facilitated discussion of issues addressed, including how racism functions in mostly white settings, and how to use theater/art to raise consciousness — with the wider goal of an ongoing discussion with people who are passionate about transformative change.
