ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the poetic implications of this theatrical approach to rituals in the poems and prose of Janos Pilinszky, as well as his views on spectatorship and witnessing at a time when liturgy and ritual overlapped in Robert Wilson’s thinking theater. Wilson’s theater is often called a theater of images, the early period—even a mute theater of images, but the secondary literature has touched very little on its ritual aspects. The early Wilson Archives at Columbia contain only a nonprofessional recording of the Iowa production of Deafman Glance. Wilson’s actor Stephan Brecht wrote a book about the Brooklyn performance of Deafman Glance. The performance confirmed his instinctive sense that poetry, and especially his poetry, needed a new mode with which to address reality, and that Wilson’s emphasis on concentrated gesture and ritual was part of this new mode.
