Word: memorandums
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...MEMORANDUM. Director Joseph Papp introduces Czech Playwright Vaclav Havel to the U.S. with this wacky and pointed satire on bureaucracy and its bombast. Robert Ronan is pluperfect as the prissy pedant of Ptydepe, an artificial office language in which "ah" becomes "zukybaj," "ouch" becomes "bykur," "oh" becomes "hayf dy doretob...
Both students and professors have been critical of ranking and grade averaging for many years, primarily because job recruiters regard them as the most important criteria for employment. In a memorandum circulated in March, the Joint Committee charged, "When such substantial differences in class rank [as detailed above] depend on such a trivial difference in averages, students can only be encouraged to make grades into a fetish...
...Producer Joseph Papp has rocked his subscribers with the original production of Hair (see above), shocked them with a freewheeling fantasia on the theme of Hamlet, and socked them with the allegorical, enigmatical Ergo (TIME, March 8). The theater's latest offering, spiky satire from Czechoslovakia called The Memorandum, winds up its season with a nervous laugh...
...Memorandum was written in 1965 by Vaclav Havel, 33, one of Czechoslovakia's leading playwrights. As a satirist, Havel is fortunate to have the doctrinaire rigidities of a Communist society as a mockable target. Memorandum, first produced at Prague's Balustrade Theater, is a witty evisceration of the absurdities of party-line orthodoxy and bureaucratic musical chairs. But no audience need live in a Commu nist country to feel the tickle of Havel's barbs-it is enough to have experienced alienation in the midst of a scientific, computerized society. His main target is the mechanization...
...language he has never seen before. This is Ptydepe-a tongue that has been introduced into the organization in order to increase the precision and accuracy of office communications. There are some rather baffling rules. Gross discovers, for instance, that a staff member who has received a memorandum in Ptydepe can be granted a translation of a Ptydepe text only after his memorandum has been translated. "In other words," he muses, "the only way to learn what is in one's memo is to know it already...