Vision Disturbance
Opening Night: September 1, 2010
Closing: September 18, 2010
Theater: Abrons Arts Center Henry Street Settlement
Playwright/director Richard Maxwell turns to the work of emerging playwright Christina Masciotti and directs Vision Disturbance, a play about a Greek immigrant woman who loses her vision.
BUY TICKETSREAD THE REVIEWS:
September 7, 2010
Mondo, a Greek-born woman living in Reading, Pa., doesn’t like the theaters in this country. They’re ugly, she says, in a voice that walks a straight and uninflected line, as if the slightest animation might throw her off balance. Her words reduce American playhouses to an unforgiving, haiku-esque collection of phrases: “Four walls. I cannot take them. We’re prisoners here. The hell of the life.”
READ THE REVIEW
September 15, 2010
Her name is Diamondo, but she goes by Mondo, Italian for world, also the root for mundane. Implications of banality may be superficially apt: This middle-aged Greek immigrant’s tone is listless, she stares blankly and drones in a yogurt-thick accent about her painfully dull existence in small-town Pennsylvania. But don’t be fooled by Linda Mancini’s deadpan, nor that of the equally superb Jay Smith, playing a shy ophthalmologist trying to help Mondo regain her diminishing sight; these lost souls possess hidden depth.
READ THE REVIEWSeptember 15, 2010
As a friend, I could confidently recommend any writer, director, or actor to get a ticket to the NYC Players production of Christina Manciotti’s Vision Disturbance. Its formal elements—the sentences, the acting by Jay Smith and Linda Mancini, the design, the rhythm, the blocking and spacing—are virtuosic. At its opening, a reticent eye doctor stands in the darkness and shines a white flashlight around the periphery of a Greek woman’s eyes. He moves the light in a circle, which throws a haunting, ten foot shadow of her head on the wall behind them. The shadow orbits the two of them as he circles the light and they share the dry, investigative banter of doctor and patient. Their voices are near monotone and the text is choppy. Within the first three seconds the audience was silent and still, and our mouths were all slightly open. I don’t think mine closed until the play was over. This was because for two hours every choice—by the writer, by director Richard Maxwell, by the actors and designers—was as sharp, small, and meticulously weird as that opening moment. Also they were all based in character. Any theatre artist could learn or steal a good deal from this ensemble that clearly knows its chops.
READ THE REVIEWSeptember 8, 2010
Richard Maxwell has nearly perfect vision. He may need contact lenses to pass a DMV test or glasses to peruse a script, but his artistic optics are 20/20 or better. Even in his less successful endeavors—such as his famously unpopular Henry IV at BAM in 2003—you can’t fault the clarity of his gaze. Maxwell lends that lucidity to Christina Masciotti’s Vision Disturbance, a play about a middle-aged woman whose divorce occasions a bout of retinal distress. In other words: She can’t see straight.
READ THE REVIEW