Review: Mesmerizing ‘Blind Runner’ at South Coast Repertory
Continuing through Nov. 8, “Blind Runner” at South Coast Repertory is an innovatively staged, gripping story of three people in whom we can see ourselves even as they seem a world away.
Written and directed by Amir Reza Koohestani and produced by the Mehr Theatre Group, “Blind Runner” is told in Farsi (Persian) with English supertitles. Haunting video projections (designed by Yasi Moradi and Benjamin Krieg) and mesmerizing music (by Phillip Hohenwarter and Matthias Peykar) create a hold-your-breath tension. And an empty stage (with lighting by Éric Soyer) allows the actors to literally run back and forth as they deliver lines.
The story opens in an Iranian jail — evinced by the sound of names called over a tinny loudspeaker — where a woman (Ainaz Azarhoush) is held as political prisoner for protesting, visited by her husband (Mohammad Aghebati) once a week. They wear jogging clothes (costumes by Negar Nobakht Forghani), suiting their hobby as runners but also suggesting a lack of pretense.
Through their meetings — which they assume are under constant surveillance by cameras — we learn about the strain the wife’s imprisonment is taking on their relationship, especially how each feels “overlooked,” a translated word that has the connotation of neglect. How can two people share a life when they only see each other once a week?
Koohestani’s writing is such that even though one may not be a political prisoner or a visiting spouse, the feelings the husband and wife subtly reveal beneath their dialogue are universal among couples — need, want, jealousy, concern, resentment, shared understanding, hidden motives. The wife is usually one step ahead of the husband, her sharp and frank observations often adding humor.
The couple sometimes speak facing each other and sometimes facing the audience, also sometimes running across the stage in opposite directions, or in unison while running in a circle holding hands. Cameras capture and project their faces at times, allowing us to see their expressions along with their bodies, whether still or in motion, adding an unusual visual dimension.
In one especially striking segment, their projected images merge into one other as they run back and forth, visually melding together as they speak, even as they move in opposition.
Compounding the couple’s predicament, the husband has agreed to train a blind female runner for a marathon in France. The young woman, Parissa, is tangentially connected to the wife, allowing the husband to feel justified in spending time training her.
Because Parissa is blind — having been shot during a political protest — the husband must bind himself to her with a band, keeping only a short distance from her as they run in synchrony, echoing how he runs in unison with his wife when they speak in prison. Parissa also apparently looks like the wife.
When we see her projected, Parissa is played by Azarhoush, but with her eyes closed and in a slightly higher, more tenuous pitch (Azarhoush’s voice is remarkably melodic). In a poetically evocative passage, Parissa finds her way to the husband’s hotel room after the marathon, sharing her feelings of attachment and longing, again in a way that conveys those feelings as fundamental to us all.
The husband has told his wife that he and Parissa plan to run from France to England via the Chunnel after the last train of the night, hoping to make it across before the first train of the morning arrives less than six hours later, potentially killing them.
Do they make it or not? It’s a story that speaks to our time of protests and forced migrations, and perhaps to all times and places — how do we navigate between societal imprisonment and personal freedom? We may run, but from whom and to where, and at what cost?
“Blind Runner” is an unusual and meaningful play that way, not only in terms of its inventive multimedia staging, but in how much depth and tension it creates in an its hour-long run time. Key to sustaining that are two actors fully immersed in their roles, each able to convey through their tones the feelings beneath their words, with subtle expressions visible in the closeups.
A prologue has the man and woman writing on chalkboards statements about “fact” and “fiction” in English and Persian, their sentences morphing until only the fundamental dichotomy of the two words remains. The blind runner is metaphorically all of us — navigating our own truths in an increasingly surveilled world, wishing for freedom, but not without the connective ties that bind.
“Blind Runner” continues through Nov. 8 at South Coast Repertory Theatre, 655 Town Center Dr., Costa Mesa, with shows Wednesdays, Thursdays and Fridays at 7:30 p.m., Saturdays at 2 p.m. and 7:30 p.m., and Sundays at 2 p.m. For tickets and information, call the box office at 714-708-5555 or visit SCR.org. Run time is 1 hour with no intermission.
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