Untitled Theater Company No. 61 is working with the Václav Havel center on the 2025 Rehearsal for Truth International Theater Festival’s Spring Readings , which will take place from April 14 – May 4. It will include staged readings and contemporary plays by award-winning European playwrights from Estonia, Lithuania, and Ukraine.  It will also examine Havel’s Vaněk character, with excerpts of Vaněk plays from Havel and others in conjunction with a new book on the subject.  All the readings are being presented free of charge, with a requested donation.

This festival’s spring edition is a unique opportunity to see how the writers of Central and Eastern European are responding to these turbulent times, while also examining how past writers have responded to other times of crisis.  The three new plays come from countries bordering Russia.  We start with Once Upon a Time There was a Rooster, a Ukranian play by Anna Halas play dealing with the current war, about a Ukranian family on a farm and a Russian soldier who stumbles into their farm. Then we present the Lithuanian play Blood Brothers by Gabrielė Labanauskaite, a tragicomedy, a paraphrase of the biblical brothers Cain and Abel, which tells a story of love, friendship and the hatred of otherness fueled by the far-right.  We conclude the series with Business as Usual, an Estonian play by Mehis Pihla, a comic and thrilling accounting of the recent Estonian banking scandal, where Russian oligarchs used Estonian banks to launder their money into the EU.

Our evening entitled Dissident Power in Havel’s Vanek features author Carol Strong, who will be talking about her book on the subject.  The talk will be highlighted with excerpts of work not only by Havel but of Pavel Landovský, Pavel Kohout, Jiří Dienstbier, and others.