Simon Stephens’s adaptation of José Saramago’s dystopian novel, about a sudden epidemic of blindness, is up—in person—at the Daryl Roth Theatre.
If you want to see “Blindness,” a new show created by Donmar Warehouse and up at the Daryl Roth Theatre—up not on some Web site but in the antediluvian sense: at a place other than your home, scheduled for a non-negotiable time—you’ll have to submit to the weird rigors of covid screening. If you’ve eaten at a restaurant or gone to the dentist lately, you can probably rattle off the questionnaire by heart: Have you coughed? Are you hot? Have you, to your knowledge, recently consorted with the possibly ill? That test successfully passed, you’ll have your temperature taken by what looks like a futuristic grocery scanner—then, with no detour to the bathroom, which is closed, you’ll be ushered to your socially distanced seat.
“Blindness,” directed by Walter Meierjohann and written by Simon Stephens, is an adaptation of José Saramago’s 1995 novel of the same name. A man goes suddenly blind while driving in traffic, although his eyes, to the onlookers who try to help him, betray no signs of damage. “Seen at a glance the man’s eyes seemed healthy,” the play’s narrator, or Storyteller, voiced by the accomplished actor Juliet Stevenson, says. “The iris looked bright, luminous. The sclera white, as compact as porcelain. The eyes wide open, the wrinkled skin of the face, the eyebrows suddenly screwed up.” This mysterious case marks the beginning of a society-wide epidemic of blindness. The plague’s victims can see only an unnerving screen of blank white. The story is bleakly consonant with recent history. Saramago’s dystopia is, give or take a detail, our documentary.
It was strange, then, given the play’s downbeat mood, to feel nervous excitement at being among people, together at the theatre. The audience at “Blindness” is grouped in pairs who have come together (singles can buy a pod to themselves), distanced from other pairs, and, at first, each pair sits under its own spotlight. There is no stage; the show occurs only in light and sound. Above audience members’ heads are a series of glowing neon tubes in primary and secondary colors, perfectly vertical and horizontal and meeting at right angles, reminiscent of the work of the artist Dan Flavin. The story, ably delivered, in a recorded monologue, by Stevenson, comes through headphones sporting “binaural” 3-D technology.
“If you can see, look,” Stevenson says at the beginning. “If you can look, observe.” I availed myself of the option, and hungrily observed my fellow-theatregoers. A man gingerly touched his partner’s abdomen. A short woman, jolted by a sharp noise in the headphones, grabbed a tall man’s arm. This is the peril of theatre without actors: for me, these non-actors became the show. Much of “Blindness” happens in utter darkness, and sometimes, even at moments of high climax, I found myself listening for my neighbors’ breaths instead of to the unfolding story.
“Blindness” alights upon the Storyteller and her husband, an ophthalmologist. He becomes blind, and, along with many other people afflicted by the plague, they take up residence in a hospital. There are outbursts of violence, and long negotiations over food—its whereabouts and how it might be distributed. As people panic and the systems of society crumble, the corpses pile up.
The audience members listen in the dark, which is sometimes sliced through jaggedly by rapid irruptions of white or pewter light. (Jessica Hung Han Yun’s portentous, occasionally emotional light design is impressive.) The Storyteller can still, miraculously, see, a fact that she hides from everyone but her husband. She organizes her new bunkmates at the hospital and helps fight back against aggressive bandits when, inevitably, they appear. As Stevenson moves the story along, the audience sits implicitly in the place of the listening husband.
The 3-D audio, designed by Ben and Max Ringham, is the real astonishment of the show. It reveals sound—echoes and close timbres; big, panoramic bangs—as an infinitely malleable tool for sculpting dramatic landscapes. Here, sound design is also set design. Sometimes Stevenson sounds incredibly close, a murmur at the ear that made my skin shiver. At other times, her voice—as well as frantic footsteps, and disorienting rounds of gunfire—seems to echo around the room at an uneasy distance. The sound design, which makes proximity an almost tangible material, subtly underlines our lingering social worry: Exactly how far from one another are we? Are we safe?
Despite the ingenuity of the lights and the sound, “Blindness” bears the closest resemblance, formally, to genres that have flowered during our quarantine year: audiobooks, podcasts, radio dramas—stuff for singles, or for pairs. With all of these, there’s no small difficulty in settling down to listen to a recording of someone speaking at length or reading paragraphs of text. Lacking a stage to fix your focus, you let the words wash over you. Stevenson is a fine performer in this context. Her screams echo and her whispers judder. When the Storyteller leaves the group in search of food, finding and befriending a dog along the way, you feel her sense of wonder. When she begins, omen by good omen, to hope, you can hear a subtle melodic lifting in her tone.
Back in 2019, Stephens’s play “Sea Wall” was presented as part of the double-monologue bill “Sea Wall / A Life.” Where “Sea Wall” seemed like a manipulative missile, aimed ruthlessly at the tear ducts, “Blindness”—perhaps because of the richness and unabashed strangeness of its source material, and its obvious correlation to current events—feels more like an inducement to thought than to feeling. And, even in thought, the plot—harrowing, then hopeful—pretty quickly starts to fade from view. The lights and the sounds are what we remember, and their complex play upon the senses and the psyche.
The thought I couldn’t kick was of the sheer presence of all those people, masked and buzzing, happy but also a bit bugged out to be dressed up and at the theatre. When, just before the show, a voice came over the speakers to remind us that this was one of the first live, in-person Off Broadway performances since the shutdown began, more than a year ago, a big cheer went up. I won’t lie: something smarted at the edges of my eyes and began to run.
The sign of recrudescent normalcy in “Blindness” is a lush rain. The downpour thrills Stevenson’s Storyteller, and reminds her of a small, old thing: washing clothes. “That was what I had to do,” she says. “I opened the door. I went outside. The rain drenched me from head to foot. It was like I was underneath a waterfall.” The great mystery of the play—why the Storyteller never loses her sight—feels almost irrelevant when weighed against the natural fact of the rain. We survive because we do, and succumb when we must. Most of the rest of the world stands by indifferently, working through its cycles. Just after this moment of catharsis, one of the theatre’s side doors opens. The whole audience, when I went, looked out at the sidewalk, and at Union Square beyond it. Framed by the door, shabbily luminous in its way, the square looked like a painting of itself, drawn from distant memory.
I miss the bodies and the mannerisms and the real, immediate, echoing voices of performers—those essential entities—but I also hope that the new plays that begin to poke their heads out into the light will find novel and artful ways to make use of the audience. The monologue, with all its informational and expository weight, is the medium of the public-service announcement, the press-conference preamble, the vague and less than helpful missive from the C.D.C. Enough, already, of being told. Let’s have huge casts on the stages and honest encounters in the seats. Let’s talk. ♦
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