By Bob Hicks
At OregonLive, Marty Hughley has just posted a terrific interview with Stepan Simek about Vaclav Havel, the philosopher-playwright who became the unlikely leader of the Czech revolution and his nation’s first post-Soviet president. Havel died on Sunday at age 75.
Simek, a native of Prague and chairman of the theater department at Lewis & Clark College, is also the English translator of Havel’s play The Increased Difficulty of Concentration. And although he met Havel just once, he had an intriguing connection with the legendary leader. “The funny thing is that my parents and grandparents were very good friends with his parents,” Simek tells Marty. “When I was born, the Havels gave my parents this cradle — a pink, wooden painted cradle — that Havel himself was cradled in. And I was cradled in it and it still is in my family’s possession.”