What happens when you take a Czech play away from its author, translate it into English, hand it over to an American director and New York actors, and let it live a completely independent life in front of a new audience? Tomáš Ráliš had a chance to find out at Bohemian National Hall in Manhattan. His Ophelia OnlyFans was presented as part of the Rehearsal for Truth festival — and in English, it may have turned out to be even more Shakespearean than it is at home.

The Rehearsal for Truth International Theater Festival was established in the spirit of Václav Havel and regularly brings contemporary theater from Central and Eastern Europe to New York. Its tenth edition in 2026 included an English-language staged reading of Tomáš Ráliš’s Ophelia OnlyFans.

But the festival is not interested merely in displaying European theater to an American audience. Its artistic director, Edward Einhorn, sees the project much more as an exchange of theatrical and political experience.

And that is where the encounter between Czech and American theater becomes particularly interesting.

American theater wants to change the world. Czech theater would rather laugh at it

According to Einhorn, Rehearsal for Truth essentially works in two ways. One strand consists of staged readings of Central and Eastern European plays, created with local directors and actors. The other brings complete productions from countries such as the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland and elsewhere in the region.

Why Central and Eastern Europe?

Einhorn’s interest naturally begins with Havel, but it does not end there. He believes the region has something important to say to Americans, particularly at a time when the United States itself is struggling with political polarization and with the question of how art should respond to social change.

He points, for example, to developments in Hungary under Viktor Orbán and suggests that Americans might understand their own political moment better if they paid closer attention to the recent history of Central Europe.

One of Einhorn’s most interesting observations concerns the difference between the two theatrical cultures.

American political theater, he argues, often moves toward activism. It wants to persuade the audience, mobilize it and encourage action. Agitprop is an acknowledged part of its theatrical vocabulary.

Central European theater tends to be political in a less obvious way. It relies more heavily on irony, metaphor, absurdity and implication. The audience is left to make the connection itself.

Sometimes, Einhorn suggests, American spectators may not even realize how political the theater they are watching actually is.

The interviewer counters with the opposite danger: Central Europeans can be exceptionally good at laughing at political problems — and then doing absolutely nothing about them.

Einhorn does not try to decide which approach is better.

Havel did not have to cause a revolution to have political impact

For Einhorn, Václav Havel is a useful example of how theater can have political consequences without producing immediate, measurable results.

Havel’s plays did not cause the Velvet Revolution. But they helped create a language for recognizing and describing the absurdities of the regime and contributed to the psychological environment from which political change could eventually emerge.

Einhorn also recalls a story told to him by a Romanian theater artist about the communist period. Sometimes, simply cooking food on stage and allowing the smell to reach an audience living with shortages could become a powerful political gesture.

Nothing explicitly political had to be said.

That kind of theatrical language fascinates Einhorn: theater does not always have to tell spectators what to think. Sometimes it only has to create an image that remains with them.

Then Ophelia OnlyFans entered the room.

Shakespeare came home through translation

Ráliš’s Ophelia OnlyFans premiered in Prague at Divadlo Komedie in 2025. Ráliš himself directs the Czech production, which takes Hamlet as its starting point and transports its characters into a contemporary world of intimacy, social media, sexuality, dysfunctional families and politics.

New York created a completely different situation.

For the first time, Ráliš could watch a public presentation of Eva Daníčková’s English translation and observe what happened when the play entered another linguistic environment.

The result surprised him.

A number of Shakespearean references, jokes and small “Easter eggs” that can easily slip past a Czech audience suddenly found themselves on familiar territory. English-speaking spectators encounter Shakespeare through their own language in a fundamentally different way.

Even the title demonstrates the difference.

Ophelia OnlyFans simply produces a different linguistic effect in English than Ofélie OnlyFans does in Czech.

Ráliš believes that some of the jokes may actually work better in English.

The translator as dramaturg

More important still was the way the English version was created.

Ráliš stresses that his collaboration with Eva Daníčková was not simply a matter of handing over a Czech script and receiving an English document some months later.

The pair repeatedly returned to individual passages, references and layers of meaning. Daníčková examined not only what a sentence said, but why it was there, what it referred to and what its dramaturgical purpose was.

And then something unexpected happened.

The translation began changing the original.

Whenever a passage remained unclear to a translator who knew the play closely and understood its Shakespearean background, Ráliš had to ask himself an uncomfortable question: perhaps the problem was not the translation at all. Perhaps the Czech text itself needed work.

Some passages were therefore rewritten in the Czech version as a direct consequence of the English translation process.

Translation effectively became a dramaturgical stress test for the original.

The author in the audience — without a veto

Ráliš allowed himself one more experiment in New York.

He deliberately stayed out of the directing process.

Because he directs the Prague production himself, he had previously experienced Ophelia OnlyFans primarily through his own interpretation. In New York, he wanted to see what somebody else would discover in the text.

The staged reading was directed by Patrice Miller, who already had experience working with theater from Central and Eastern Europe.

For Ráliš, this became another stage of writing.

He could sit in the audience and observe what happened when his play was placed in somebody else’s hands: where the audience laughed, where it remained silent, which elements another director emphasized and which disappeared.

For an author who is also the director of his own work, that is a rare luxury.

Sex, guns, drugs, dance music — and big ideas

What attracted Miller to the play was precisely its compressed mixture of subjects.

In the interview, Miller describes Ophelia OnlyFans as a feminist work containing guns, sex, drugs, dance music and large political and philosophical ideas, all squeezed into a relatively confined theatrical space.

That kind of dense, layered material is exactly the sort of work Miller enjoys.

The New York reading did not attempt to connect the politics of the play to one particular contemporary event.

The action may technically take place in Denmark and the text may have been written by a Czech playwright, but the play is not “Czech” in a geographical sense. It is not about Prague — just as the New York version was not suddenly about New York.

That ambiguity became an advantage.

American spectators could interpret the relationships through their own political experience. Polonius’s compromises could evoke contemporary politics. The recurring image of a “mole” could mean an actual mole, but also a spy or informant.

For Miller, that immediately carried a particularly Central European resonance because of the region’s history of informants and surveillance.

The creative team resisted turning any of this into a direct portrait of a particular politician.

In the United States, Miller notes, scandals now arrive so quickly that a production tied too closely to an event from six months ago may already feel outdated. It is more useful to allow the play to become a container into which spectators can pour their own experience of permanent political scandal.

And then there was the Little Mole

During the dramaturgical research, Miller also encountered one of the great icons of Czech culture:

Krtek — the Little Mole.

The famous animated character became, quite seriously, part of the preparation for the production. Its bright cartoon aesthetic even influenced some of the colorful cardboard props used during the staged reading.

And so Shakespeare, OnlyFans, political violence and Zdeněk Miler’s cheerful little cartoon Mole somehow ended up inhabiting the same theatrical universe.

The Mole himself did not ultimately appear on stage.

Although, judging from Miller’s enthusiasm in the interview, that possibility may not be dead forever.

A week to make Hamlet

The amount of rehearsal time makes the result even more remarkable.

The team had only around a week to put the reading together. Yet the performance was considerably more than several actors sitting behind music stands.

Movement, choreography, props and simple scenic devices all became part of the staging. Bedsheets provided one of the basic visual tools, immediately becoming beds, screens, hiding places or surfaces for shadow play.

Miller would retain that basic concept in a possible full production.

What would change is the amount of time available for the actors to develop the arcs of their characters — and particularly for the choreography of the violent sequences.

The stylized shootout, Miller suggests, could eventually operate almost like a ballet. Precision is particularly important in comedy, where timing can determine whether an entire sequence works or falls apart.

Miller is also quick to transfer much of the credit to the cast.

The actors brought not only professionalism but generosity toward one another and a willingness to share their individual strengths while tackling an unusually complex and layered text.

A director can build the structure, Miller says in effect, but eventually has to sit down in the audience and give the performance to the actors.

And this ensemble took it from there.

Ophelia leaves the Czech Republic

New York is not the end of the journey.

Ráliš speaks of Ophelia OnlyFans as a play beginning to acquire a life outside the Czech Republic, and he is interested in seeing how it changes as it enters additional languages and theatrical cultures.

That may ultimately be the most interesting result of the entire New York experiment.

Presenting a Czech play abroad does not necessarily have to mean exporting a finished Czech production. There is no requirement to put the scenery on a plane, bring the original actors along and reproduce exactly what audiences already see in Prague.

Sometimes it may be much more useful to send only the text.

Let somebody else translate it.

Let somebody else direct it.

Let different actors interpret it.

And let a different audience laugh in completely different places.

The playwright may then discover that the play he wrote is not quite the play he thought he had written.

And in the case of Ophelia OnlyFans, that the road from Prague through Shakespeare to New York can, apparently, also pass through one small Czech Mole.