Where is my Home? (A Love letter to Czechslovakia)

Photo: Jiri Sediak

= Where is my Home? (A Love letter to Czechslovakia) is educational theater from Pilsen’s Alfa Theatre, directed by Jakub Vasicek. It uses 15 performers in drama, monologue, songs, live video of the performers, historic archive video and puppetry to present the social, political and artistic history of Czechoslovakia/Czech Republic from 1918. Its title is the name of the Czech national anthem. Much to its credit, it teaches without dogmaticism. 

Director Jakub Vasicek weaves various techniques together to create a single fabric. Kamil Belohlavek’s complex set gives us puppets and video on either side of the main stage. A videographer roams the main and marionette stages. The production, as straightforward as it is, asks us to do some complex processing. At one point the family we’re following is at the dinner table when a rock singer climbs up on it to belt out a song. The family never acknowledges them, and we’re asked to receive multiple realities in one image.

The complexity of the production never falls into disjointed post-modernism. What’s more, it never falls into mindless jingoism.

Both Czech and Soviet Russians appear as puppets; the devisers are refusing to take a position viz-a-viz history. The narration is generally objective, but the passage on The Prague Spring adds the comment “Hope lasted only six months before being smashed.” 

Whether we were previously familiar with Czech history or not, by the end of Where is my Home? we would all sign a love letter to Czechoslovakia.

review
Steve Capra
September 2019
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