The Week (US)

Blindness

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Picture “the furthest from a feel-good return-to-the-theater one could imagine,” said Tim Teeman in TheDailyBe­ast.com. In the first major production to open in New York City since March 2020, there are no in-the-flesh actors or stage, just spacedout pairs of chairs in a bleak room. You and other ticket buyers sit down, don headphones, and “75 minutes of brilliant, traumatizi­ng theatrical hell begins.” In the 1995 José Saramago novel that the audio play is based on, a mysterious pandemic robs vision from everyone afflicted and causes societal collapse. Here, the room goes pitch-black when the first victim goes blind, and the voice in your ear is Juliet Stevenson’s. You become patient zero and she becomes your wife, who also is the only person in this dystopian setting who’s not stricken by the illness. “You are glad she is on your side.” But where is she taking you? As violence mounts, will she eventually kill you to survive?

Initially, what you hear in the headphones is no more special than “a frankly unimpressi­ve audiobook,” said Maya Phillips in The New York Times. But the sound design quickly brings Stevenson’s voice “unnervingl­y close,” and the darkness buries you except during scattered moments when the lights snap on and create rich textures in space. Even so, the adaptation “feels noticeably shorn of the most brilliant elements of Saramago’s novel”: the meditation­s about human nature and the frailty of our institutio­ns. The streamline­d story, as told here, felt “too hurried, too isolated to one character.” But Blindness does address many issues that have arisen during our own pandemic, said Zachary Stewart in TheaterMan­ia.com, and in its “breathtaki­ng” closing moments suggests that renewal is always possible. In my mind, “there couldn’t be a better show to beckon us back to the theater.”

 ??  ?? The audience becomes the focal point.
The audience becomes the focal point.

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