Wolfgang Maria Bauer

“If I think about my play, I see an abandoned seaside resort in the last light of day. An old man with a gaunt face is standing on top of the cliffs: Pinon. He has lived alone on the cliffs, in a house that he built into a prison, for eighteen years. He doesn’t speak, but he helps, if someone comes to the cliffs who really wants to jump. And I hear the faint music from the ‘Dance Palace’, I see Gratia, serving the few guests for eighteen years in her way, but I also see the ugly scars on her face. And I smell the mouldy wallpaper in the ‘flop house’, smell the unwashed clothes of the doorman, smell his foul breath. And I hear Sebastian, hear him talk into the darkness on the bench at the waterside promenade, hear his wish for a story. And I see Daniel, see that he wants to pay because someone listened to him, maybe for the first time in eighteen years. And I see Vera walk through the night, see her in front of the billboard with the long-expired event suggestions, and I hear her memorize the posters. They all share a story: the play. I neither can nor want to retell it, that is the task of the characters, and my characters never talk about themselves, but only about who they randomly meet in this night. They only look at themselves with the eyes of a stranger and then find a story in the happenings, which means they are making each other up, each gives the other one a story – his own.” (Wolfgang Maria Bauer)