THE 2025 REHEARSAL FOR TRUTH THEATER FESTIVAL Spring Reading series | April 14 – May 4, 2025

2025 SPRING READINGS

The 2025 Rehearsal for Truth International Theater Festival’s Spring Readings 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.

And also as a side offering the show Cabaret in Captivity, seen two years ago in the reading series, will be presented in full at an associated venue, Torn Page, in honor of Holocaust Remembrance on April 26 - 27. The program includes songs and sketches from the Terezin, performed in Czech, German, Hebrew, and English.

The Reading Series is a prelude to 2024’s edition of Rehearsal for Truth: Perseverance, which will run May 26 – June 15.

Reservations

“The reading series provides a rare opportunity to hear artistic voices from Central and Eastern Europe. We are at a time marked by war, and once again the region finds itself in the center of conflict. These plays reflect on war, oppression, and its legacy, and they provide a way to connect to both the human trauma and perseverance that is part of that legacy.”

— Edward Einhorn, Director of the Rehearsal for Truth Theater Festival.