Bricolage Production Company to Present SAMIZDAT This Spring

Bricolage Production Company will present three all new site-specific theater experiences on the heels of back-to-back, sold out runs of their beloved Midnight Radio Live series. Samizdat, which launches March 26 and plays just 12 performances through June 7, will bring intimate stagings of three Václav Havel plays to secret spaces throughout the city,revealed only to ticket holders.

The series takes its name from samizdat, the underground practice of self publishing and distributing banned literature throughout the Soviet bloc. In Czechoslovakia, samizdat publications circulated among dissidents and intellectuals in the years leading up to the Velvet Revolution, the movement that ultimately ended decades of authoritarian rule. Václav Havel, a playwright and outspoken critic of the Communist regime, was repeatedly censored, surveilled, and imprisoned for his work before later becoming the first president of the Czech Republic.His plays examine the moral compromises and quiet pressures that shape everyday life under authoritariansystems. Samizdat is presented with the support of the Czech Consulates General in Los Angeles and New York as well as members of Pittsburgh's Czech community.

Samizdat opens with Audience, running March 26 through March 29, directed by Steven Michael Wilson andstarring Bricolage Co Artistic Director Jeffrey Carpenter alongside Robert Anthony Peters as Vaňek, Havel's autobiographical stand-in. Set in 1970s Communist Czechoslovakia, the play follows the blacklisted playwright as he confronts subtle pressures from authority and wrestles with questions of integrity, complicity, and survival.

The Unveiling, directed by Azadeh Kangarani, runs April 30 through May 3 and features performances by Peters,Tony Bingham, and Bricolage Co Artistic Director Tami Dixon. Theplay explores the uneasy reunion of old friends whose convictions have shifted under the comforts and compromises of ordinary life.

The final installment, Protest, first produced by Bricolage in collaboration with The Fountain Theater in Los Angeles in 2025, runs June 4-7. Directed by Jeffrey Carpenter and starring Steven Schub alongside Peters,Havel's 1978 play examines how a seemingly modest request between friends escalates into an intense confrontation of values, revealing how intellectual debate can expose deep ethical fault lines.

Samizdat resonates in a time when civic freedoms, expression, and public discourse face increasing pressure. Across Havel's three plays, characters confront scrutiny, coercion, and moral compromise while navigatingforces both visible and unseen. The works reveal the quiet toll of surveillance and social expectation, and the enduring struggle to maintain integrity, courage, and creativity in difficult circumstances.

Longtime champions of unconventional theatrical models that expand the boundaries of performance anddeepen audience participation, Bricolage approaches Samizdat as a return to essential storytelling. The productions are intentionally intimate and resourceful, emphasizing immediacy, imagination, and the enduring power of theater to engage urgent civic questions.