Maeterlinck, Maurice (Writer) & Thorgeirsson, Kristjan (Director). The Blind. [Play.] The Vortex Theater Company, New York City, March 5-April 3, 2005.

Reviewed by David Kornhaber, Columbia University

"Have pity on us," one of the characters begs at the very end of Maurice Maeterlinck's The Blind. Whom she is addressing is not entirely clear — a menacing presence may or may not be approaching. But Maeterlinck's line seems as much directed at the audience as at the other characters in the play. Written in 1890, The Blind was a revolutionary advance in the theatre; its emphasis on mood and ambiance over plot and character helped in part to give rise to the surrealist and the symbolist movements. The story concerns six blind men and women (condensed to three by translator and adapter Bathsheba Doran) abandoned in the wilderness by the priest who is charged with their care. It is a taut and engrossing piece. From the outset of the play, we can see the priest's dead body among the actors (in the current production he has hung himself from a tree), and we watch in horror as the players slowly realize their perilous predicament.

For an audience with contemporary sensibilities, however, the play is highly problematic: It depends for its effect on the utter helplessness of the blind characters at its center. Though they have been sightless from birth, not one of Maeterlinck's unnamed personages seems able to function. The characters, sitting in a circle, can barely locate one another, let alone find their way out of the ominous wood. This is partly just a dramatic convenience: Abandoning four capable individuals in the forest is hardly the stuff of great drama. And it is partly a mark of Maeterlinck's own time. The home his characters wish to reach is in fact an asylum of sorts, where they are housed alongside the insane and looked after by the clergy. The blind in Maeterlinck's universe are dependent and sick; they are not productive members of society.

This sense of being excluded from society lies at the center of Kristjan Thorgeirsson's recent version of Maeterlinck's thriller. Thorgeirsson produces his version of the play not in a theatre but in the hull of The Frying Pan, an abandoned steel ship docked just north of New York's Chelsea piers. Audience members are led through the dark, cavernous interior one by one until they reach the playing space, where they are told where to sit and left to wait–some for as much as half an hour–for the performance to begin. With no heat, little light, and barely a cushion to sit on, the audience is stripped of everything familiar. So too, it seems, are the actors. Thorgeirsson has his cast perform wearing opaque contact lenses such that their vision is entirely obscured. They act not as men and women who were born blind but as people who were suddenly robbed of their sight, stumbling awkwardly around the playing space, tentatively groping for something to hold onto.

The issue, Thorgeirsson seems to say, is not so much blindness as abandonment, literal and figurative. Taken far away from the world we are used to, even we in the audience are made to feel helpless and alone. Without the assistance of a crew member, it seems impossible to find your way out of the dark, rocking boat. The actors onstage are thrust unhelped into the world as well: A certain degree of their fear seems real, the terror perhaps of being suddenly sightless below the Hudson River. Is it any wonder, then, that the characters in Maeterlinck's world seem so lost and forlorn? Taken away from their families as children and sent to an institution on a deserted, wooded island, they have never been given the kind of support and resources so essential in developing true independence. Their helplessness comes not so much from their blindness as from their utter abandonment by society.

To drive this point home, Thorgeirsson bookends his production with two receptions. Audience members who arrive early are treated to a genial gathering in the ship's lounge, complete with wine and candles. After the performance, audience, cast, and crew come together for a full dinner in the middle of the stage. Among such camaraderie, the creaking metal of The Frying Pan seems less foreboding, the path back to dry land not so hard to find. It is a relief to be incorporated back into society — a relief that makes it easier to understand the terror and defenselessness of Maeterlinck's isolated heroes.

Thorgeirsson's approach is perhaps the only way to make sense of Maeterlinck's play in today's world. To present the drama unchanged is to exploit a damaging stereotype of the helpless blind man or woman for the purposes of dramatic tension. To change the text itself is to neutralize an effectively suspenseful situation. In Thorgeirsson's arrangement, however, the play is as much about the audience as it is about the characters. We are all equally afraid, Thorgeirsson says, all equally in search of help and support. In this context, Maeterlinck's final line becomes especially resonant. Do not just have pity on disabled people, his actors seem to ask. Have pity on us all.