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Brown Theatre's production of Maurice Maeterlinck's The Blind is an antic exploration of fear and longing. The play bravely, and sometimes ridiculously, explores the ways in which fear motivates us to turn away from personal events or global crises that may be hard to keep in focus. Part clown show, part searing commentary on the "percepticide" prevelant in our times, The Blind takes a look at surveillance culture to ask how we have become so adept at not seeing the ways in which we constantly self-monitor, self-censor, and self-discipline. It also asks how we have become so adept at not seeing each other.
Maurice Maeterlinck wrote this parable play in 1890 about twelve blind religious citizens who find themselves abandoned on an island by their priest. In fact, the priest lies dead on stage the entire time. The blind, being blind, can't see that fact -- and thus their predicament. The Brown production, which takes a number of 21st-century liberties with the script, features Professor Emeritus James O. Barnhill playing the dead Priest, as well as an ensemble of eighteen talented actors, a baby, and a dog! This production even includes, perhaps surprisingly, dancing and singing and the use of cell phones and video monitors. You'll have to see it to believe. If, that is, you've still got your sight.
The Cast
| The Priest |
James O. Barnhill (Professor Emeritus) |
| Blind Ensemble |
Lucian Cohen ‘09,
Jessie Hopkins ‘08,
Hollis Mickey ‘10,
J. D. Nasaw ’08.5,
Michael Obremski ‘07,
Kristen SaBerre ‘07,
Anika Schwarzwald ‘07,
Charly Simpson ‘08,
Michelle Ilutsik Snyder ’09.5,
Kathryn Wallem ‘07,
Nicholas White ‘10,
Alice Winslow ‘08 |
| Dog Ensemble |
Rachel Cronin ‘08,
Sharon Lee ‘09,
Daria Marinelli ‘10,
Nina Mozes ‘08,
Ida Mae Specker ‘09,
Michelle Tan ‘10 |
Director’s Notes:
Maurice Maeterlinck (1862-1949) wrote the play Les Aveugles in 1890,
twenty-one years before he would be awarded the Nobel Prize for lit-
erature. Many have argued that this play and his other Symbolist works
for the theatre are essentially language plays (or, perhaps better, “silence
plays,” fundamentally suspicious of language). Without a doubt, howev-
er, Maeterlinck wrote his plays for performance. His Pelléas et Mélisande
opened the Théâtre de l’Œuvre in Paris in 1893 and the production the-
atrically underscored the general Symbolist investment in dreamscapes,
hallucination, myth, and ritual. The Symbolist rejection of representa-
tionalism in art was rooted in the belief that truth is beyond the sensory
world and can only be intuited through a rich use of allusory symbols
to evoke a meditative state of mind. Much of Pelléas and Mélisande was
staged in semi-darkness with the actors moving like sleepwalkers, gestur-
ing solemnly in a highly stylized manner. The actors spoke in a staccato
and monotone chant, broken by long pauses and repetition, and the au-
dience viewed the entire performance through gauze stretched across the
proscenium as if “through the mists of time.” In an essay outlining his
approach to theatre titled “The Tragical in Daily Life,” Maeterlinck wrote
that he was not interested in a theatre of action, where plot and event
are key, but in a “static” theatre: “It is not in the actions but in the words
that are found the beauty and greatness of tragedies.” But interestingly,
for Maeterlinck it is not great words that make tragedy great. With a twist
that had resonance in Naturalism as well as Symbolism -- that is, in the
Modern theatre -- Maeterlinck argued that “the only words that count
in the play are those that at first seemed useless, for it is therein that the
essence lies.”
It is common to say that the Symbolists did not engage with social prob-
lems or the relationship between humans and their environment (that
was a Naturalist preoccupation). But such a claim would be shortsighted.
Politically motivated directors, such as Vsevolod Meyerhold, would craft
productions of Maeterlinck and other Symbolist works as, precisely,
productions aimed at political change (though the degree of their suc-
cess is topic for a different set of notes). The point here is that this play
has struck our production team in 2007 as not only deeply invested in
its own time, but pertinent to a contemporary set of fears and concerns
about society, ethical engagement, the environment, and the coming of
the future.
Maeterlinck wrote The Blind at the turn of the 20th century and his play
expresses an enormous sense of anxiety. For example, the importance
of the baby to the play begs the question: What would the new century
bring? Will the young, born on the threshold of the new century, be able
to “see”? That is, will they be able to navigate what is coming their way
(literally in the approach of footsteps from the future)? The twelve blind
people who find themselves stranded on an island with weather out of
control and birds migrating erratically are waiting for a Priest whom
Maeterlinck has scripted as lying dead on stage -- dead from the very
beginning. Even more than in Beckett’s Godot, the arrival of the awaited
figure is a predetermined endgame. However, the blind, being blind,
cannot “see” that their leader is a corpse. They continue to invest in his
return, though they are increasingly terrified about their future. To late
19th-century audiences, the parable would not be hard to interpret: Had
God really died, as Nietzsche had proclaimed, leaving humans to fend
for themselves?
Right away, we felt that staging this play seven years into the 21st century
would be a fascinating project. Might blindness mean both literal blind-
ness and the refusal to see? Can we be “blinded” through inundation
with images? That is, does our dependency on screens in so-called visual
culture promote a kind of blindness? In an age of increased surveillance,
is vision displaced? Is surveillance a mode of disciplining citizens, as
Foucault has claimed –- indeed disciplining us to act blind (what Diana
Taylor has called “percepticide”)? If hyper-visibility is a contempo-
rary reality, what account can we give for those kept solidly from sight
-- those lost in the prison industrial complex, or those robbed of rights
as so-called detainees? Can we see those who have been denied even their
names? To ask this question, we have employed a shadow ensemble
alongside Maeterlinck’s blind, as you will see.
Maeterlinck’s dead Priest is clearly provocative, and arguably still reso-
nant. The matter of God, dead on stage, is an interesting one for our
time. Are we still afraid that God is dead? Or are we perhaps afraid that
God is not dead, judging from the acts of violence that continue to take
place in “his” names? We asked ourselves these questions repeatedly.
Should we place a live actor on stage feigning death? Or, make a dummy
appear as if it were once alive? Perhaps death, like God, is sometimes less
decidable, less complete, less corporeal, less obvious. But the God figure
was not the only staging puzzle. How should we stage the “Big Dog”
that somewhat randomly “enters the forest”? And then, what about the
crying baby? Everyone knows that children and animals and corpses are
huge “No Nos” in the theatre. They are very distracting. Then again, so
is video.
Finally, what about the cast? Maeterlinck called for six blind men and six
blind women. In Maeterlinck’s play, the men are vastly dominant, wielding
a huge percentage of the lines. Three of the “older women” do nothing
but pray and one “mad woman” never speaks. We decided to cast gender
blind (though not entirely, as some sense of Maeterlinck’s gender divide
remains), and we also worked to divide the lines more evenly between the
“men” and the “women.” We worked to retain Maeterlinck’s humor -- he
is very funny at times -- and we hope that our adaptation is essentially
true to the original text. Anyone interested in comparing the original 1895
Laurence Tadema-Alma translation to our adaptation may visit
brownblind.blogspot.com.
Maeterlinck wrote during the First World War that “No nation can be
deceived that does not wish to be deceived ... No nation permits herself
to be coerced to the one crime that man cannot pardon. It is of her own
accord that she hastens towards it.” The coming century that terrified
Maeterlinck’s twelve blind parishioners lies behind us now. Were the fears
of Maeterlinck’s Blind well-founded? What about today? What are we
afraid of? What are we afraid to see? Will the 21st century be as vio-
lent as the 20th? Does all of Maeterlinck’s weather imagery -- storming,
flooding, seas rising, great ice forming -- carry a contemporary urgency,
perhaps more literal than symbolic? This production explores these issues
and while we make some obvious (and troubling) suggestions, we (like
Maeterlinck) offer no answers. We hope that our production provokes
questions as we trust, perhaps blindly, that questions themselves can be
productive.
Rebecca Schneider with José Enrique Macián '08
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