Blindness (The Play)
So, after just remembering Blindness the other day, I saw in my weekly Time Out that there was a new play adapted from Jose Saramago’s Nobel Prize winning novel. I loved this book, and although I had my doubts based on a skimming of the New York Times review (I hate reading reviews and generally never even look at them, unless I know nothing about a show) I bought some tickets to the Sunday night showing.
Long story short, the play was engaging for the hour or so it lasted, but carried almost none of the weight the novel expertly maintains, but never belabors.
The most important thing missing from the equation, for me, was the narrator. His telling of the story, with his many asides and feeling of a regular Joe talking about an extraordinary circumstance, was so amazingly key to the overall mood and accessibility of the work, that omitting him turned the story into little more than a particularly harsh episode of Lost.
That said, I should remember that I did enjoy the show.
And I should, also, remember to check back at the theater at 59 east 59th for the other show running right now called Attic which was adapted from an originally Japanese play about a company that sells tiny attics for people to use for escaping reality.
