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Figure 1. "Murder Scene" with Robert Wilson, Expectation/Deafman Glance (2009).
Photograph by Monika Rittershaus. Source: www.robertwilson.com
I should still like to repeat the whole act now, filled out with other, new motifs, as
it also repeats itself again and again in me, if only because this scene was the play’s
obvious raw material.
The scene starts in a lit-up auditorium, indicating that we commit our most
hidden acts out in the open, in the limelight; that is, in such a silence and loneliness
as in the very center of an overcrowded arena.
The stage — for this period — is blocked with an enormous brick wall, as if
shutting events off from itself from the very start. In front of the brick wall stands
a small table: a bottle of milk on it. With his back to the spectators, a blond boy
sits on his stool. Sheryl comes in from the left, rippling in her slowness like a
nun possessed, and rigid as a seminarist preparing to commit the first sin of his
priesthood. Sheryl’s every step is aimed for this and against this. First she tenderly
gives the child a drink, then replaces the empty bottle. How and what she performs
is a rite rather than a sin, more precisely: the fulfilment, more burdensome and
abstract than any duty, of the last phase of a sin. First of all she has to dress. She
pulls her elbow-high black gloves onto both arms, hands. Then she has to take in
her hand and open the razor laid ready on the table, and with it she then cuts the
child’s throat in a split second, while with her free left hand she has already covered
him over.
In a few moments the sheet is blood-soaked from head to toe, but before Sheryl
can go off she still has to close the razor and put it back. From then on one can sense
that she has become weightless and steps unsteppingly, that all she would like to do
is to sleep, that she is already asleep, but before that she still has to get out. And she
does make an attempt to do so, when a black boy, the same age as the one she has
killed, blocks her way. Like vomit a howl breaks out from the boy. Sheryl claps her
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