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Playwright Arthur Miller is the latest of a growing number of writers and artists around the world calling on Czechoslovak authorities to free jailed playwright Vaclav Havel. “I can’t imagine a government in Europe in 1989 doing this to a writer. It is beyond belief, it is a horror,” says Miller. Havel, a founder of the Charter 77 human rights movement, was arrested Jan. 16 for calling for protests to mark the 20th anniversary of the suicide of student Jan Palach, who took his life to protest the 1968 Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia. Havel’s plays are acclaimed abroad but banned at home. Miller’s play, “The Archbishop Ceiling,” highly critical of Czechoslovakia’s Communist rulers, is currently playing in Budapest. Notes Miller: “It’s amazing. We live in curious times.”
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