Read The Ride Across Lake Constance and Other Plays for Free Online Page B

from the figures on stage into the surrounding area, once up into the rigging loft, then—this without bending down—into the prompter’s box,
then into the vault of the theater as though up into the fifth tier of an opera house—at any event, never at the audience itself: the audience does not exist for the figures on the stage. One notices that all the figures briefly come to a complete stop, but the next moment one or two are walking again. At moments the general conversation almost lapses into complete silence; there are also moments during which only the rustling of garments on the floor is audible, whereafter the conversation resumes more vociferously and insistently than before.
    The figures walk about making almost no sound, lost in themselves, stand still, are still, chat: that’s actually all there is to it. It’s entirely up to the actors what they want to say. They can talk about what they’ve just read in the papers, what they’ve experienced that day, what they want to experience, about what just occurred to them, or about something that gives the impression of having just occurred to them … a few times one thinks one hears them speaking a foreign language, probably French: C’est très simple, Monsieur. —Ah merci … oh! ma coiffure! … Ah! Ce vent! … Cette pluie! … Or something of that kind, invariably uttered by the women. The audience of course strains to listen, but only occasionally gets a few words, or snatches of sentences.
    Among the words and sentences that the audience does understand—besides the irrelevant and meaningless ones like “Do you understand?” “Not that I know,” “Why not?” “As I said,” “And you?”—are some which the audience merely thinks it understands. These are words and expressions which in the theater act like bugle calls: political expressions, expressions relating to sex, the anal sphere, violence. Of course the audience does not really hear the actual expressions but only similar ones; the latter are the signal for the former; the audience is bound to hear the right ones. For example, instead of napalm they mention no palms onstage; instead of Hiroshima they speak of a hero sandwich; instead of cunnilingus
of cunning fingers ; instead of psychopath of bicycle path; instead of leathernecks of leather next ; instead of Auschwitz of house wits ; instead of dirty niggers of dirty knickers . .. Or the actors use double-edged words in sentences with invariably harmless connotations, but in such quick succession that one listens to the ambiguous words instead of the sentences, for example: thigh, pick, member, spread, panties, tear, pant, cancer, victim, fag, rag, paralysis, stroke, frag … Many sentences, which appear to be quite harmless, are also uttered in quick succession; however, they contain words which, when they appear in clusters, begin to give the illusion of an allusion: A sentence with the words tiger cage ( “I didn’t want to put my tiger in the cage but the cops insisted.”) is followed by a sentence containing the word gook (“I wasn’t completely satisfied until I had wiped the gook off the wall.”), which is followed by a sentence with the word waste (“Sad to say, but we had to waste a lot of … time”), which is followed by a sentence containing the words anti-personnel weapon (“Anti-Americanism is a weapon I personally refuse to use.”), which is followed by a sentence with the word infrastructure (“The infrastructure of the organization, if I may say so, consists of living bodies, all you have to do is count them”), which of course also contains the words body count in slightly different form, and which is followed by a sentence containing a distorted form of the words Tonkin Gulf & Saigon (“Tom’s kinfolk made a resolution not to take the Gulf Line steamer to Saigon .”) and