While Stevenson leans into her performance, we become an entry for the woman’s confidants. Thanks to the embracing sound design of Ben and Max Ringham, the sound makes the actress uncomfortably close: you can almost feel her breath on your ear as she whispers what she sees, and her way around you as the sound moves from one earpiece to another bounce. I cringed reflexively when I heard the buzzing of flies, which seemed to flutter around the outer curl of my ear.
As the character unfolds, so does Stevenson, and her voice becomes breathless with desperation. In one scene, as an animal-like group of blind men demands to be offered to women in exchange for food, her rasping cry is “Monsters!” rises to a roaring scream.
Stephens, a winner of the Tony Award for his stage adaptation of “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time,” makes bold, sensible choices here, especially given the limitations of creating socially distanced theater. Yet this “Blindness” feels noticeably cut off from the most brilliant elements of Saramago’s novel. The lyric that philosophizes about human nature is lost in translation, cut for Stevenson’s more direct narration. Other voices, already muted in the book, disappear completely. Similarly, the indispensable comments about how institutions let their people down fall by the wayside.
As soon as Stevenson utters the word ‘epidemic’, with a sharp British click on that ‘C’, the shadow of Covid-19 looms over the 70-minute game. But the coronavirus did not come up to me much while I was there. This epidemic story felt too individual – too hasty, too isolated to one character, too negligent with the larger social story – to fully translate what we have experienced over the past year.
The last minutes of the production are sudden and give a summary of the last act of the story. It is as if the program, produced in a world fighting a real pandemic, still has no idea how to end the story of the fictional epidemic.
Instead of the end of Saramago, Stephens reaches an earlier scene in which three women bathe in the rain. The change miraculously centers the resilience of women in the story. But it ultimately feels like an empty gesture, given the ways in which the adaptation affects the development of characters other than the doctor’s wife.
For someone like me, who has just read the novel, “Blindness” is more of a sensory experience than a rich theatrical call; more than a fable about hope and humanity, it plays a thrill to long-deprived ears and eyes.