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Diversions
Play provides insight, energy
By Mike Lauterbach
Published:
Thursday, October 24, 2002
Mike Lauterbach -- Theatre Critic
Not all of us know a blind man. For those of us who don’t, an SCSU production that opened Tuesday is a good second best.
“Butterflies are Free” catches Don Baker, a young blind man (played by Adam Lesar) in the middle of a two-month experiment to see if he can live alone.
The play is set in his apartment in New York, where he falls in and out of love with a flighty neighbor (Jill Tanner, played by Samantha Brix) and works through troubles with his mother, who seems determined to keep him at home in her care.
It was a challenging setup–one apartment and only four actors to carry the entire play and two (Lesar and Brix) to carry almost the entire first act.
In the first act, both leads needed to get a lot of expository material covered. Detailed discussions of Baker’s mother troubles and Tanner’s love history filled up about the first 45 minutes. One-liners (including some pretty good blind jokes) kept the play moving, but the tremendous time devoted to telling these characters’ life stories sometimes made the play feel more like a therapy session than a live action drama.
But once the explanations were through, the play got into its groove and began to take a life of its own. Don Baker’s mother, known only as Mrs. Baker (Christina Stamos), made her entrance and immediately livened things up.
A seeming modern-day Cruella DeVille, the elder Baker stalked around the room with her nose in the air. She carried around a Saks Fifth Avenue Bag and a chip on her shoulder. Strong verbal condemnations of orgies and great facial expressions made her fun to watch and listen to throughout.
The rest of the cast matched her energy and loosened up, and from there things only got better. Joseph Wicker was brilliant in a cameo as the most hyperactive play director this side of a psychiatric award. Lesar showed great skill portraying Baker’s crisis. Both leads finished off the performance with gusto and emotion.
For anyone who has grown up with any kind of sensory handicap or disability, this play is a must see. One of the best aspects of the play was its gutsy brand of humor, in which Baker pokes fun at his disability and the stereotypes around it (“If I had a sixth sense then I’d only have five, wouldn’t I?”). But just as gutsy was the way that the very real limitations of Baker’s blindness were brought out and dealt with.
Lesar rose to the challenge of portraying a blind man. To train him for the part, he said, the director invited a legally blind man from SCSU Disability Services down to the set. Lesar said he learned “a lot of little things,” like how to use the cane, how to feel for chairs, and so on that helped bring the character to life.
That knowledge came in especially useful late in the play, when his character started to do more and more of those little things wrong as he went through his time of crisis.
“Butterflies” plays all week on the main stage in the Performing Arts Center.
If the cast can keep up the momentum they ended the show with, this play will be well worth watching.
