Theatre in Review: The Valley of Astonishment (Theatre for a New Audience/Polonsky Shakespeare Center)

	Photo Credit: Pascal Victor.

How do we know? That's the question nagging at Peter Brook and his colleagues in The Valley of Astonishment, a beguiling and original entertainment that kicks off Theatre for a New Audience's new season. A light-fingered and dryly humorous piece with a slight, but pronounced, undercurrent of melancholy, it nevertheless poses big, unanswerable questions: What is knowledge? What is memory? How, exactly, do they work?

In the hands of Brook and company these are not dry philosophical conundrums à la Rene Descartes and the British empiricists. The existence of reality is not questioned, nor is our ability to grasp it. People are not portrayed as merely the sum total of their subjective perceptions. Instead, Brook is fascinated by the problem of how information- - visual, aural, abstract- - enters our brains, is processed into knowledge, and is retained as memory. In other words, how do we know?

To explore this question, Brook and his co-author, Marie-Hélène Estienne, have invented a woman, named Samy Costas, who is capable of the most astonishing feats of memory. (Samy is based on a real person, Solomon Shereshevsky, whose history is featured in the book The Mind of a Mnemonist, by Alexander Luria.) Samy, a journalist, is called out by her boss one day for not taking notes during an editorial staff meeting. She then astounds him by recalling every detail of the event, down to the specifics of each assignment and the phone numbers assigned to her and her colleagues.

Bemused, Samy's boss sends her to a pair of researchers-"Cognitive science? What do they study there?" she muses before entering for an interview-whom she stuns with her mnemonic abilities. Given a series of numbers, or words in a language she doesn't understand, she memorizes them instantly, forward and backward. When one of the doctors, thinking he has her cornered, asks her to repeat the data "outward from the center, in spirals," she merely asks, "Clockwise or anticlockwise?"

Samy, it turns out, has synesthesia, the cognitive phenomenon by which certain people "see" words as having colors and shapes. (She notes that one of the doctors has a voice that is "very orange, but nice.") There is more to it than that: Each letter has a specific form for her, as does each word. Further explaining her method, she says she "encrusts" words with memories that allow her to recall them. Furthermore, she takes each word to be memorized and places it on a different street drawn from her memory; she then wanders these streets mentally, retrieving each item in the correct order. Of course, the fact that she does all of this within seconds is beyond explanation.

Her abilities exposed, Samy quickly loses her job-her boss thinks mere reporting is beneath her-and she enters into an odyssey of sorts that leads her to others with unique cognitive skills. A young man with synesthesia describes the colors that he "hears" while listening to jazz, "painting" the white stage floor with colors (an effect realized by the resourceful lighting designer Philippe Vialatte). Another, older man, for whom the normal connection between brain and movement does not exist, describes how he wills his body into different positions, an effort achieved with no small expenditure of mental energy. A one-armed magician provides considerable amusement with card tricks that display his phenomenal mnemonic abilities.

By now, Samy has become a performer herself, although her success nearly proves her undoing. Wowing audiences nightly by rattling back instantly memorized sequences of words, she finds her brain filling with up with piles of useless information that she cannot erase. (Those streets of memory become horribly clogged.) She begins working with numbers only because she remembers them differently-as items on a shelf. Soon, however, her mind becomes overfull with these as well. Having demonstrated almost superhuman abilities, she now has a single, poignant question: "How do you forget?"

Everything in The Valley of Astonishment unfolds on a nearly bare stage, to seamless effect, with the gifted cast easily handling a text that has the spareness and compression of poetry. Kathryn Hunter, whose voice is so naturally reverberant it is as if every syllable she utters has collided with a tuning fork, is an ideal Samy, especially as she comes to decide that her gift may not be much of a gift at all. Jared McNeill is effective as Samy's bemused boss, the synesthetic young man who sees music, and a theatrical agent who specializes in mental athletes. Marcello Magni is especially delightful as that cardsharp magician, working the audience like a professional vaudevillian, but he is also touching as the doctor to whom Samy best relates. Two musicians add much to the piece's overall mood-Raphaël Chambouvet, with pleasing jazz keyboard stylings, and Toshi Tsuchitori, who ends the proceedings with a flute solo that strikes the right note of gravity.

If I have any reservation about The Valley of Astonishment, it is that Brook and Estienne haven't formed their material into a more dramatic pattern. Instead, the piece is rather like a cabinet of curiosities, with each character designed to add to our wonder about the mysteries of human perception. But the wonder is real, and honestly arrived at. As we are reminded, the greatest mysteries can be found inside our own heads.--David Barbour