Czech President Sees His Play Performed in Native Language : Stage: Vaclav Havel’s ‘Audience’ was banned until the ‘velvet revolution’ brought him to power at end of 1989.

It was a classic example of East European drama, both on and off the stage.

The play, long suppressed here, centered on a boozy conversation between a brew master/secret police informer and a blacklisted, dissident playwright forced to take a manual job at the brewery. But the collaborator is too human to hate, and the dissident too fallible to worship.

In the audience was the real playwright, seeing his 15-year-old work performed on a public stage, in his native language, for the first time ever. But the playwright is no longer a dissident; now he’s the president of Czechoslovakia. Except that you would never have known it from the way his old theater pals dragged him on stage for the curtain call and exchanged good-natured insults with him.

The ecstatic audience did not know if it was watching theater or participating in it. It was all so comic and tragic and ambiguous and perfect.

“This is not just a play,” director Jiri Menzel bubbled. “This is a happening!”

And film maker Michael Wolkowitz, who has been taping it all for a Public Broadcasting Service television special to be aired in the United States in early spring, called it “the most remarkable theatrical experience of my life.”

The real-life, dissident playwright-turned-president is, of course, Vaclav Havel, who moved into Hradcany Castle, the traditional home of the Czechoslovak head of state, after this country’s “velvet revolution” overturned 41 years of Communist rule in just 10 remarkable days at the end of 1989.

His one-act play, “Audience,” is well-known in the West but had never been publicly staged in his native land until this week, when New York-based executive producers Wolkowitz and Robert Kanter arranged four performances--two in English, two in Czech--for their PBS special.

Underwritten by Shearson Lehman Hutton Inc., the television production is also to include documentary sections on Havel and interviews with the president and various other Czechoslovak citizens, including workers at the Trutnov brewery where Havel worked briefly before writing the play in 1975.

“Audience’s” dissident, named Vanek, features in two more Havel plays, and later he was borrowed by three of Havel’s best friends, who wrote a total of five of their own plays around him. All the plays are full of laughs, but to call them comedies belittles their penetrating insights into a repressive system.

In the introduction to “The Vanek Plays: Four Authors, One Character,” editor Marketa Goetz-Stankiewicz writes: “None of the four writers provides the comforting service of pitching poor, nice Vanek against brutal representatives of political power. . . . Such a reassuring, cowboy-movie pattern does not emerge from the intensely searching literature of Central Europe.”

There are no villains in the Vanek plays, Goetz-Stankiewicz adds. The characters he encounters are too human in their weakness, greed and fear to be truly evil.

“Nothin’ can ever happen to you,” the besotted brewer shouts at Vanek during the climax of “Audience.”

“There’s always somebody interested in how you doin’. You always know how to fix that. You’re still up there, even when you’re down and out.

“Damn right you gonna fight for your damn principles. They’re worth a fortune to you. You know just how to sell them principles. You’re makin’ a killin’ on them. You’re livin’ off them. But what about me? I only get my ass busted for havin’ principles!

“You always got a chance, but what kind of a chance have I got? Nobody’s gonna take care of me. Nobody’s afraid of me. Nobody’s gonna write anything about me. Nobody’s gonna gimme a hand. Nobody’s interested in me. All I’m good for is to be the manure that your damn principles gonna grow out of.”

Vanek’s principles, meanwhile, prevent him from doing the brew master the favor of writing surveillance reports on himself. But he is tempted by the prospects of a transfer from the freezing brewery basement to a cushy job in a warm warehouse. And, at the end, he adopts his boss’s own crude vocabulary to agree that “everything’s all f---ed up.”

Wolkowitz, a partner in New York’s MJM Creative Services, and Kanter say they got the idea for their special after seeing the English-language stage production by Actors Studio of “Audience” in New York early last month. About the same time, Havel and the Civic Forum democratic movement were in the process of peacefully overthrowing Communist rule here.

Wolkowitz and Kanter wasted no time putting together a production and financing package and bringing the Actors Studio team to Prague to put on the two English-language performances here, starring Lou Brockway and Kevin O’Connor at the Cinoherni Club just off famed Wenceslas Square.

The Czech production stars Josef Abrham and Pavel Landovsky, who was able to return to his native country after years in Vienna exile after last month’s revolution. Before his exile, he and Havel used to put on the play themselves for their friends.

Havel attended the first of the two Czech-language performances and afterward kidded Landovsky for stumbling over some of his lines as the drunken brewmaster. When Landovsky protested that he had only had a few days to prepare for the role, Havel shot back: “Pavel, you’ve had 16 years to learn this. You have no excuse.”