The Theater: Spengler Redux

THE RIDE ACROSS LAKE CONSTANCE by PETER HANDKE It is difficult to say what this play means, but relatively easy to tell you how to write it. Rip out pages from lonesco, Pinter, Beckett, Kafka, the Austrian philosopher Wittgenstein and Alice in Wonderland. Tear these into tiny fragments and scatter them on the stage. Austrian Playwright Peter Handke, 29, is a derivative word-vandal. He is currently quite the vogue in Europe, which suggests that the decline of the West is progressing more rapidly than Spengler envisioned.

The play's two principal figures have a Doppelgänger relationship. Each is the split image of the...

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