Reviewed by David Kornhaber, Columbia University

Writer and performer Lynn Manning describes his autobiographical one-man show Weights as a "personal journey from being a black man to being a blind man," but an incident half way through complicates these easy identifications. Recently struck blind by a near-fatal gunshot to the head, Manning is denied entry to a job training program for the disabled. It is too soon after his injury, he is told—he must first go through a grieving period. Manning does have a great deal of emotional upset still to overcome, but he also has no one to support him and as yet no means to support himself. The program's refusal to acknowledge any factors other than Manning's blindness—its insistence on seeing him only as a "blind man"—proves far more harmful than helpful. It proves downright cruel.

As the incident illustrates, Weights is not so much about the journey from one identity to another as it is about learning to negotiate the spaces in between. Independent from one another, Manning's recollections about being a "black man" and being a "blind man" would provide little in the way of exceptional material. The stories of his life in South Central LA, which include a criminally negligent mother and a string of abusive step fathers, are sadly reminiscent of so many other tales of impoverishment and abuse. And the account of his progression from despair to empowerment after becoming blind retells a redemption myth that has been part of Western literature at least since Oedipus at Colonus, where blindness becomes the tragic experience par excellence—the dreadful loss that begets transcendent wisdom.

In overlaying the two narratives, however, Manning achieves something unique. Juxtaposing his childhood struggle with poverty and abuse and his adult struggle with blindness, he avoids the heartbreaking redundancy of the one story and the archetypal mythos of the second. Instead we see the multiple factors that go into crafting personal identity at work. The single-minded dedication with which Manning approaches the daily tasks he must relearn after going blind—walking, reading, even using the toilet—helps to temper and channel the remaining anger from his boyhood experiences. The discrimination he faces as an impoverished inner city youth, in turn, prepares him to deal with the stereotypes he encounters as a blind man. And when Manning at last finds a community of blind artists and writers whom he can befriend, we know that his joy is not simply that of finding other people "like him." It is the joy of finding the family that he never knew before.

Weights could perhaps only work as a one-man show, a form much abused for its economic virtues. Manning's performance is not so much about the stories that he tells, which could easily be acted out by an ensemble cast, but about their interplay within him, about the cumulative effect that they have had on his outlook and his sense of self. To describe Manning as a "blind man," to limit him to a single physical trait, is to miss the point. He is the product not of one violent moment but of an entire personal history. Indeed, it might seem that Manning chose the one-person form for its aural nature and consequent conduciveness to blind audiences, but he has, in fact, taken pains to make certain that the performance does not privilege either blind or sighted spectators. Combining an evocative sound design and a penchant for poetic description with an extensive vocabulary of gesture and movement, Manning aims to provide a rich theatrical experience for all audience members.

Ultimately, Manning decides to reject the employment program that insists on a period of grieving, as they only would train him for a menial position. The proposition of limiting all the country's blind men and women to unskilled labor seems laughably absurd, though Manning never makes this point directly. He doesn't need to. In Weights, his personal story provides argument enough against constraining classifications of all kinds. Identity, Manning contends, is a matter too important to be left to any single trait. Identity is something we must come to construct for ourselves.