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Strange times demand provocative art.
That’s one factor behind Bricolage Production Company’s decision to ramp up its performance calendar this year after a long hiatus.
Later this month, the troupe will stage the first play in a series it’s calling “Samizdat,” borrowing the term used in Soviet Russia for banned publications circulated by hand. Shows will be announced only shortly before they open, and will be staged in private locations revealed only to ticket-buyers.
The first play is “Audience,” a 1975 work by Václav Havel, the dissident poet and playwright who served as president of both Czechoslovakia and the Czech Republic after helping foment the so-called Velvet Revolution ending Communist rule there, in 1989. The next two plays (also set for this spring) will be announced Mon., March 9, when the remaining tickets go on sale.
Bricolage co-artistic director Jeffrey Carpenter launched the series after directing a production of Havel’s 1978 play “Protest” last year at the Fountain Theatre, in Los Angeles.
Carpenter was a fan of Havel’s since his college days, but he says, “The conversations after the show were the thing that convinced me we had to do this.”
“The impetus was the times that we’re living in,” adds Carpenter, amid news of a growing police state, ramped-up surveillance and trampled civil liberties in the U.S.
“Samizdat,” as Bricolage’s web site puts it, is inspired by “the quiet but deliberate defiance of Czechoslovakian dissidents ahead of the Velvet Revolution.”
The one-act “Audience” depicts a meeting between a Czech brewmaster and one of his employees, the blacklisted playwright Vaňek, a stand-in for Havel who appears in several of his plays. Their discussion, with elements of dark humor recalling Harold Pinter and even David Mamet, revolves around the workplace and a possible new assignment for Vaňek. The politics are largely cloaked in metaphor.
The plays are “very gray-area but they really have a lot of compassion for how the impact of authoritarian rule weighs on the population in all kinds of socio-economic strata,” says Carpenter. He plays the brewmaster, with Robert Anthony Peters as Vaňek and Stephen Michael Wilson directing.
The play marks a re-emergence for Bricolage. For years, starting in 2002, the troupe ranked among Pittsburgh’s most innovative theater companies. It was known for its Midnight Radio shows (hearkening to the golden age of live radio, complete with home-made sound effects) and for helping pioneer immersive theater in Pittsburgh with ambitious productions like 2012’s “STRATA,” which took over an entire Downtown building.
But Bricolage has been retrenching since 2020, when it lost both its Downtown theater and office space and the cavernous venue in Harmar where it operated The Imaginarium, its theatrically minded escape room.
The group did continue running both its theater-based education program in area schools and The Imaginarium, which reopened in Etna. But save for a couple of holiday-themed Midnight Radios, its last full-scale production was the 2019 immersive “Project Amelia.”
“Samizdat,” says Carpenter, reflects a back-to-basics commitment to low-budget but high-impact theater.
That’s signalled in the venues for the upcoming performances, which according to the group’s website are “[i]nspired by the underground apartment performances of Soviet-era dissidents.”
The small venues mean tickets will be scarce. But Bricolage says the approach recalls a tradition that “honors art that survives by staying just out of reach.”
“It is how it was done back then,” Carpenter says.