Endless View

Jona sits in her windowless cabin, facing her breakfast egg. Ten-day roundtrip through the Caribbean. Her sister gave her this cruise as a present. Only, the cruise is over, has been for a while. And Jona is still sitting here: is it two weeks now? Three? Any sense of time dissolves in these exotic waters. And in any case: what does time mean, faced with the gigantic ocean out there? Even the sea is getting on Jona’s nerves by now. She starts talking about how it all began, how the first passenger suddenly collapsed and died of a strange virus. Then others fell victim to it. Since then, the ship has been under quarantine; they are not allowed to dock anywhere, drift on the ocean like a swimming Chernobyl. Jona has become part of a luxury jail where the ‘inmates’ are beginning to get used to their new, monstrous normality. But the food is slowly running out. And Jona doesn’t know if she still has her old job, back home.

Literally confined to minimal space, yet with almost biblical impact and interspersed with caustic comedy, in Theresia Walser’s monologue a small life unfolds to portray a catastrophe for humanity.