The Memorandum

In his first season as impresario of off-Broadway's Public Theater, Producer Joseph Papp has rocked his subscribers with the original production of Hair (see above), shocked them with a freewheeling fantasia on the theme of Hamlet, and socked them with the allegorical, enigmatical Ergo (TIME, March 8). The theater's latest offering, spiky satire from Czechoslovakia called The Memorandum, winds up its season with a nervous laugh.

The Memorandum was written in 1965 by Vaclav Havel, 33, one of Czechoslovakia's leading playwrights. As a satirist, Havel is fortunate to have the doctrinaire rigidities of a Communist society as a mockable target. Memorandum, first produced at Prague's Balustrade Theater, is a witty evisceration of the absurdities of party-line orthodoxy and bureaucratic musical chairs. But no audience need live in a Commu nist country to feel the tickle of Havel's barbs--it is enough to have experienced alienation in the midst of a scientific, computerized society. His main target is the mechanization of human beings.

Josef Gross (Paul Stevens), the director of a large organization, has just received a memo written in a language he has never seen before. This is Ptydepe--a tongue that has been introduced into the organization in order to increase the precision and accuracy of office communications. There are some rather baffling rules. Gross discovers, for instance, that a staff member who has received a memorandum in Ptydepe can be granted a translation of a Ptydepe text only after his memorandum has been translated. "In other words," he muses, "the only way to learn what is in one's memo is to know it already."

The new language takes over the firm, juggling its personnel so thoroughly that Gross finds himself demoted to staff watcher, for which he must monitor peepholes into five offices at once. Eventually he persuades a secretary to make an unauthorized translation of his memo--which turns out to be a document praising his opposition to the spread of Ptydepe. Restored at last to his post as director, Gross has been so depersonalized himself that when the secretary appeals to him to keep her from being fired for translating his memo, he cannot even put in a good word for her. It might jeopardize his job, he explains, in which he is "attempting to salvage the last remains of Man's humanity . . . but I must go now, and have my lunch."

Papp's company prances through this reductio ad absurdum. Especially good is Robert Ronan as a Ptydepe instructor lecturing a class on interjections: " 'Psst!' becomes 'cetudap,' 'mmnn' becomes 'vamyl,' the poetic 'oh!' is rendered in Ptydepe by 'hrulugyp.' Our very important 'hurrah!' becomes in Ptydepe 'frnygko jefr dabux altep dy sa-varub goz terexes.' "

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