Human action, not human design (Part 1)
The Memorandum
The New Criterion
Kevin D. Williamson
December 2010
Maybe it was the pending congressional elections, but in November Theatre Row was the scene of an onslaught of plays that resonated terribly with these troubled times: The York Shakespeare Company staged Macbeth and Richard 11 back-to-back – with the same cast-at the Clurman Theatre, while across the lobby at the Beckett, The Actors' Company Theatre, under the direction of Jenn Thompson, put on an extraordinary performance of The Memorandum, a brilliant and neglected work by Vaclav Havel.
Havel, the crusading anti-Communist dissident who served as the final president of Czechoslovakian and the first president of the Czech Republic, is a hero and a man of letters, a figure who brings to mind such fellow anti-communists as the once-obscure Polish playwright Karol Wojtyla and the Russian novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn - which is to say, he is a man whose role in history overshadowed his role as an artist, one whose name will endure regardless of his literary merit. But our subject here is drama, not politics, so the question is: Sure, he's great, but is he any good? Mr. Havel, audiences will be delighted to discover, is at least as good as he is great, and he proceeds through The Memorandum with a remarkable lightness of touch- a terrible lightness that points to the terrible darkness of the inhumane, totalitarian system whose name is never once uttered on the stage.
The Memorandum is the story of a persecuted bureaucrat Joseph Gross (James Prendergast), who presides over an organization whose sole purpose seems to be producing reports and suffering audits, with the miserable but conscientious Gross caught between his faceless pitiless superiors and his scheming, ambitious underlings. Mr. Prendergast, it is worth noting, stepped into the role on short notice when TACT's Simon Jones was sidelined after being hit by a car. (New TACT valediction: "Break some ribs!") Slumping around the stage in what appears to be a very shiny Versace suit denoting his character's status as big boss bureaucrat, Mr. Prendergast executes with pinpoint comic timing so deftly performed that his skill draws no attention to itself. Rather than rely on the emotions that most readily lend themselves to comedy – exasperation, rage, and lust – Mr. Prendergast portrays Gross mostly as a man in sincere pain: a functionary who suffers not for himself and his own desires but because he sincerely wants to do a good job, to do the right thing, but he cannot.
Why can't he? The most pressing problem is that his blackmailing, back-stabbing deputy, the devious Ballas (Mark Alhadeff, in perhaps the finest of the play’s performances) has conspired to introduce an artificial language into the bureaucracy, Ptydepe – a language that is scientifically constructed, rational, and utterly disconnected from the complex of human relationships that gave rise to the natural languages. Ptydepe, it is promised, will impose reason and efficiency on the relations of all who use it: It is designed in such a way that words with similar meanings are as orthographically dissimilar as it possible. In order to prevent errors – and, even more important, its words have no history, so they have no emotional overtones or secondary connotations. As Ballas explains: “As natural language endows many more-or-less precise terms, for example the term ‘colored,’ with so many wrong, let’s say emotional, overtones, that they can entirely distort the innocent and eminently human content of those terms.” The obvious answer is to replace the word “colored” with the connotation-free work “mitarex” – problem solved! A new tongue for the new man – and a new era under a revolutionary regime of centrally imposed, scientific planning: It that sounds familiar to you, they you are more perceptive than Rachel Saltz of The New York Times, who seems to think this is a play about the tedium of workplace life, as though it were a kind of haute European version of The Office.