A discussion on Václav Havel by four famous American playwrights, Edward Albee, Israel Horowitz, Anna Deavere Smith and Wallace Shawn, and a formal "belated" handing of the OBIE to the former Czech President - those were the final events of the New York Havel Festival on December 4, 2006.
The playwright saw almost half of the Festival productions including the plays he claims to have forgotten altogether. The world premiere of the playful Motormorphosis (as a puppet production) or the TV drama A Butterfly on the Antenna, staged for the first time as theatre production, were mostly designed for Havel connoisseurs. Nevertheless, the staged readings of The Conspirators (starring Kathleen Turner) and the production of the Mountain Hotel (directed by Michael Gardner) made the author change his mind and correct the "ranking" of his own work.
The festival peaked with weekend evening performances of the best known Havel's plays (attended by the representatives of Aura Pont). Both the off-off-Broadway venues (Brick Theater in Brooklyn and Ohio Theater in Lower Manhattan) were filled with a mostly young and sharp audience. The Memorandum, Largo Desolato and Temptation were directed by Edward Einhorn, Eva Burgess and Ian W.Hill with deep understanding for Havel's almost musical composition and for his humor, using the great quality of American actors - their rhetoric skills. The best acting contribution to the festival came probably from Richard Toth, the erstwhile protagonist of the Prague's English language Theatre Misery Loves Company TC, as Staněk in The Protest directed by Robert Lyns.