While the impetus for change in the late-communist Soviet Union came from above, its source in East-Central Europe, as Barbara Falk notes in Dilemmas of Dissidence, lay elsewhere.1 That elsewhere was below, from civil society. Falk credits East-Central Europe’s dissident writer intellectuals after 1968 for theorizing in the (post)totalitarian context the formation, function, and possibilities of what they called the parallel polis, second society, or counter-public sphere.2 Nevertheless, isolated from the broader population and barred from publishing, the writer-dissidents’ influence on the population, particularly in Czechoslovakia, was limited. A small group of Czech theatre artists, however, functioning as organic intellectuals in the Gramscian sense, developed ideas that paralleled and often preceded those of the writers, from whom they were effectively isolated for a decade by their suspect position in official, state-supported theatres. They not only developed the framework for what civil society could accomplish but, moving beyond the writers, explored in a detailed, practical, and dramaturgical way how it could be engaged, influenced, and finally imagined as having a national identity in contrast and opposition to the state. Their means of doing so despite official status and the public nature of their art constitutes a poetics and “antipolitical” politics of authorial theatre. Civil society, argues Michael Walzer, designates “the space of uncoerced human association and also the set of relational networks—formed for the sake of family, faith, interest, and ideology—that fill this space.”3 Unlike Hungary, where elements of a free market and semi-independent organizations effectively depoliticized society and demobilized intellectuals, or Poland, where Solidarity and the Catholic Church created organizational space for independent initiatives to develop, Czechoslovakia lacked the kind of organizational, institutional, and semi-independent terrain that afforded traditionally defined civil society space to grow. The 1968 Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia brought with it a new, neo-Stalinist government that sought to “normalize” society through Party purges,