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"The Increased Difficulty of Concentration," written by Czech playwright turned Czech President Vaclav Havel, opens Friday at Kent State University at Trumbull.
Eric Kildow, director of the production and artistic director of the theater program at Kent-Trumbull, is a fan of Polish and Czech playwrights, especially Havel.
"Particularly in the case of Havel, he was facing a difficult situation as essentially a dissident under communism in Czechoslovakia," Kildow said. "His plays were considered against the norm. He spent a fair amount of time in jail, but he was considered a figure of such moral conscience that in the first free election, he was brought to the presidency.
"The idea he had of 'living in truth' speaks through his works. Although they're bizarre, absurdist comedies, there is a very hard grain of truth in the middle of them that I find very appealing."
"Concentration" focuses on a day in the life of Eduard Hummel, a doctor of philosophy juggling a wife, a mistress, an alluring secretary, philosophical questions about life and questions from a machine known as Pazuk.
"Of all of his plays, it's the least overtly political," Kildow said. "Some haven't aged well or don't travel well. American audiences are not coming to them from the same context as his original audience.
"This one has a strong comedic energy to it, so it translates better in the U.S."
The cast features Peter Byrne, Christine Fowler, Adrienne Mackey, Sierra Boyle, Mariah Armstrong, Charles Smith, Nicholas Shearer, Jordan Montgomery and Nicholas Narkum.
Kildow said he tried to familiarize the cast with the history of the piece and what was going on in Czechoslovakia in the late '60s when it first was staged to increase their understanding of the work and their characters.
"What I do when I work with the cast is really give them an understanding of the world where the play came from," he said. "From that point, I start to look outward at our own world. Where can we find analogs to things that are similar, things in the same vein to bring it to today?
"If you do it in a strict, historically accurate way, it becomes a museum piece."
An additional challenge is that the play's 30 scenes unfold in nonchronological order with the acting shifting back and forth to different times of day. Kildow said he actually arranged the scenes in chronological order as part of his preparation to help the cast see the narrative arc within the farcical tale.
"We actually, at the beginning of the rehearsal process, played through each of the reassembled scenes to give the actors the feel of these conversations. Even though they are sliced and diced, they have a complete arc to them. You have to play that arc, just play them in a fragmented way."