Theater: The Murky Way

Do You Know the Milky Way? (by Karl Wittlinger) presents two actors playing twelve roles in a search for one man’s identity. They never find it. Hal Holbrook (best known for his Mark Twain act) touchingly plays the hero, a childlike German veteran of World War II whose tormented self-quest has made him a patient in a mental institution. George Voskovec plays his psychiatrist and all other speaking roles in a virtuoso acting stint. In pursuit of “psychodramatic therapy,” doctor and patient enact Holbrook’s life until he winds up as a daredevil motorcyclist in an act called ”The Flying Saucers.”

Despite murky dramatic symbolism, German Playwright Karl Wittlinger poses a clear question: Can a sensitive, relatively innocent German atone for his nation’s past war guilt? The answer is devastating in its self-pity and irresponsibility. Neither the West nor the East will permit Germany to atone, to “fight the cold war with peace.” The endlessly zooming cyclists are part of the space race, and an unseen “General” has decreed that this race must go on and on. When he realizes this, Holbrook picks out a spectral home on the Milky Way. Playwright Wittlinger poses as a Pirandellphic oracle, but his hollow parable is less an adventure of the mind than an abject failure of nerve.