SOURCE: "Farcical Worlds," in New York Magazine, Vol. 16, No. 48, 5 December 1983, pp. 149-50.

When the three Vaněk plays were staged off-Broadway in 1983, they were given the collective title A Private View. In the following review of that presentation, Simon declares "Protest" the best of the pieces.

Vaclav Havel, the Czech playwright and fighter for human rights, is utterly heroic and admirable in the latter capacity. Twice jailed (once for four and a half years) and reduced to such menial labor as working in a brewery for championing freedom in general and the unjustly prosecuted in particular, he has also proved a decent and interesting writer, even if not in a league with such fictionists as Milan Kundera, Bohumil Hrabal, and the brilliant but politically unsavory Vladimir Paral. Though, right now, he is out of jail, Havel's works cannot be openly performed or published in Czechoslovakia, which makes the...