Czech playwright and politician Vaclav Havel, who would have turned 90 years old this week, was a different kind of president: He too had been an outsider with a visceral understanding of the connection between theater and politics, but he used it to defeat – rather than try to impose – a totalitarian regime.  A dissident and a political prisoner who spent years in jail, he led his country’s “Velvet Revolution” and reluctantly became its head of state starting in 1989.

When Havel wrote “Unveiling,” in 1975, he had gained an international reputation as a playwright, but his own country’s regime banned his plays, and he was forced to work in a brewery.  This did not stop his countrymen from seeing them; they were performed secretly in people’s living rooms.

This is necessary context to appreciate the current revival of “Unveiling,” directed by Edward Einhorn. Quite aptly, for example, his Untitled Theater Company No. 61 is presenting the play at an intimate venue that is cheekily called Torn Page, which was the living room in the Chelsea townhouse owned by the married actors Rip Torn and Geraldine Page.  And then, the main character of “Unveiling,” Ferdinand Vanek, is a playwright who has stopped writing plays, and works in a brewery. Vanek was not just an obvious autobiographical stand-in for the author in this particular play; the character pops up in other Havel plays, and was also incorporated into the work of other playwrights, becoming a symbol and inspiration for Czechoslovak dissidents. 

“Unveiling” is one of the four such scripts by Havel in The Vanek Plays (Theater 61 Press, 224 pages), published in English translation the year after his death in 2011. It is one of the many projects to promote Havel’s work over the last three decades by Einhorn and his company.

All of this gives heft to the short, seemingly slight play about Michal and Vera, a comically self-satisfied couple who invite Vanek over in order to “unveil” their newly remodeled home. They boast about the new dining room, their acquisition of a Turkish Scimitar, their “steal” of a Gothic Madonna,  an entire confessional they rushed to get from a liquidated church. But they don’t stop there. They also boast of their latest possessions (An electric almond peeler from Switzerland), about how intelligent and handsome their toddler is, how  Michal is a great father, and Vera a terrific a cook, how ideal their marriage, even how vibrant their sex life, demonstrating how they kiss in front of an embarrassed Vanek. And they pair each of these with corresponding and completely unveiled criticism of Vanek and his wife Eva – how their house is a mess, Eva is a lousy cook, even how inadequate Eva’s amorous attentions. (Understandably, Eva stayed home, although Vanek claims she’s not feeling well.) Each critique comes with the same refrain:

Michal: We’re only trying to help you
Vera: We like you a lot
Michal: You’re our best friend

It’s only subtly that we get what’s going on beneath the surface. Vanek at one point talks about the reason he has been unable to write: “These times, everything that is going on, you get such a feeling of futility.” And Michal and Vera tell him to snap out of it – stop hanging out with questionable friends; start accepting things the way they are. “We’re in a nasty predicament, and it’s only going to get worse. And you’re not going to change any of it.”

The Czech audiences watching this surreptitiously in a living room, during the communist regime’s rigidly enforced “Normalization” crackdown, surely got right away that Havel was offering a portrait, albeit comically tinged, of complacency and complicity.   It might take just a little longer for New York audiences in 2026, even those of us who recently read  “Profiles in Cowardice” a new non-fiction book about eight prominent Americans who initially “recognized the danger Trump posed to American values” but nevertheless capitulated to him.

Unveiling
Untitled Theater Company 61 at Torn Page
Running time: 45 minutes
Tickets: $2 book fee (a $25 donation would be appreciated)
Written by Václav Havel
Translated by Jan Novak
Directed by Edward Einhorn
Cast: Craig Anderson as Michal, Bob Brader as Vanek, Yvonne Roen as Vera.
Costumes: Ramona Ponce
Stage Manager: Berit Johnson