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| Priscilla Pointer, Keene Curtis. |
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| Salome Jens, Stephen Elliott, Paul Hecht, Keene Curtis, Priscilla Pointer. |
The Ride Across Lake Constance, translated from the German, proved a highly controversial choice because of its puzzling, abstract plotlessness, unusual characters (called by the names of those who played them), and illogical, verbose dialogue. Audiences and critics were confused by the lack of familiar dramatic guideposts. There were frequent disruptions by enraged spectators frustrated by enfant terrible playwright Peter Handke’s apparent disregard for their concerns; one of his best-known works is called Offending the Audience . Lincoln Center producer Jules Irving even had to appear and debate the play’s values with angry preview audiences.
Clive Barnes announced that “the play had only been going
for a few minutes when I realized that I did not know what was going on.”
Harold Clurman admitted that he, too, did not understand the play, but both he
and Barnes also expressed their fascination with it.
Set in what seems like a hotel lobby, or a fancy parlor,
with an ornate staircase at the rear, the play shows a group of eccentrically
costumed, made-up, and mannered characters behaving as if at a fancy dinner party. A
series of ill-defined episodes proceed, in the course of which a tale is
recounted of a man who arrived by horseback at a village on Lake Constance
during the winter, unaware that his trip took him successfully across the thin
layer of ice covering the lake. This story relates to the title, a reference to
the German proverb about taking a trip across Lake Constance, which translator
Michael Roloff explained means “the person has been in a situation of
considerable danger and has been unaware of it until afterwards.” In the tale, the horseman drops dead on hearing that he has crossed
the lake without mishap.
Several critics tried to clarify the point of this
antitheatrical play. Walter Kerr saw Handke’s concern as being with the control
words and objects have over us, as opposed to our control over them. The drama’s
automaton-like personages “do the bidding of their words and their habits.”
Stanley Kauffmann argued that this Dadaesque comedy was about “the relation of
language and reality. . . , the relationship between what we present, in words
and related action, and what we contain, and how one affects the other.” For
Edith Oliver, the often funny play was all “very shrewd nonsense” that was “theatre
about theatre—every convention and cliché of every sort of theatre—and perhaps
about movies, too.” Clurman “got from the play . . . a parodistic collage of
the conditioned reflexes of folk in ‘good society,’ particularly at dinner
parties and other such semi-formal occasions.” John Simon, however, was
convinced that the play was “a fraud,” “utter self-indulgent nonsense.”
Carl Weber’s production was quite good, although Michael
Smith wrote that it might have been more artless and unvarnished in tone. The noteworthy cast included Kathleen Doyle,
Stephen Elliott, Paul Hecht, Salome Jens, Priscilla Pointer, Keene Curtis,
Margaret Howell, and Kathryn Howell.