Darkness faced with honesty

Richard Ouzounian
THEATRE CRITIC
Thursday, November 23, 2000

SMUDGE

By Alex Bulmer. Directed by Alisa Palmer. Designed by Carolyn M. Smith. Lighting designed by Andrea Lundy. Until Dec. 10 at the Tarragon Extra space, 30 Bridgman Avenue.
****

Smudge is a play with amazing vision.

How ironic that its topic is blindness.

Author Alex Bulmer has taken the experience of losing her sight through retinitis pigmentosa, and turned it into a brave, moving and surprisingly hilarious piece of theatre.

Diane Flacks plays Freddie, a young woman who suddenly finds she is experiencing "spiderwebs in back of the eye." A doctor diagnoses her disease, and refers to it as "RP."

"RP," repeats Flacks. "That must be for the baseball caps and team jackets."

And Freddie keeps using that gallows humour as things get blurrier, and a simple walk across a Second Cup becomes a perilous journey whose every beat must be calculated in advance.

As she sinks into a world of "foggy jello," she consoles herself by listing other famous blind people: "Stevie Wonder, three mice, Oedipus."

But the laughter finally wears thin, and the journey through darkness gets bitter.

When a well-meaning biddy chirps "I can't think of anything worse than what you've got," Flacks' tart comeback is, "Then maybe you're not thinking hard enough."

Anger follows, then fear, and desperation, until finally she writes in letters two feet high to the one person who might have the answer: "Dear God, what were you f---ing thinking?"

In the end, an acceptance of sorts, and a farewell to sight forever.

Flacks is amazing as Freddie. She eschews her well-honed comic persona to bring us inside this person's very complex feelings.

There are two points in the play when Freddie's blindness increases, and the emotions that sweep across Flacks' face on both those occasions are too multitudinous to mention, and too delicate to calibrate.

Alisa Palmer has directed with invention, offering a series of images behind a translucent screen that reflect the way Freddie increasingly sees the world.

Her work is strengthened further by the careful lighting of Andrea Lundy, including one sequence where a dance club mirror ball dissolves into the flickering specks of light on the periphery of Freddie's vision.

Kate Lynch is impressively sensitive as the gentle forces in Freddie's life, and Sherrylee Hunter does well as the harsher ones.

But in the end, the evening's success belongs to Alex Bulmer, who has faced her darkness with honesty, and to Diane Flacks, who brings it to us with compassion.

This is a play worth seeing, in every sense of the word.