Theater review: Imagination and becoming in 'Mind’s Eye'

It seems simple enough, a play that is limited to a set that is one room with three beds, all of them occupied by women from different contexts with the most diverse set of needs, cutting as they do across generations. This room is sparsely furnished, has a TV that doesn’t work, stark white sheets that speak as well of the cold cold winter outside.

 

It is in North Dakota as it is in the middle of nowhere. It could also be anywhere really, this narrative of two lives intertwined by the limits of a room, the sadness of an ending, the undoing that’s in the lack of a future.

 

For teenager Courtney (Jenny Jamora) and elderly lady Elva (Joy Virata), this room is all of the world that they have. This is all they need.

 

Not the power of the mind

 

It is easy to think that the point of “Mind’s Eye” is that the battle with loneliness and sadness, with being left behind—as these two women have been—is easily won by the mind’s power to shift perspective and think differently about one’s situation. And yet there is more here than just that cliché, especially in the face of a 16-year-old who can only become self-centered in her wallowing. 

 

In “Mind’s Eye” the battle in fact is between Courtney and Elva, both wanting to escape not quite literally from that space, as they are wanting to escape from their own individual doldrums and regrets. Elva had always promised her dead husband that they would travel to Italy, but he died too soon, with no Italy trip in his memory. Courtney was angry with the world, abandoned as she had been by her father and stepmother, losing most her friends who remained their happy teenage selves.  

 

Courtney could not be that, with legs paralyzed from a car accident, and an existence now limited to that bed, in an old people’s home in the middle of winter in North Dakota. She barely has visitors, and she is rarely in the mood for conversation. She is grumpy and can turn mean, especially since Elva was one to insist that they talk, about anything and everything in the world, about the fact that she needs Courtney to escape. 

 

That is, escape via their imagination. Elva had kept an old travel book on Italy, the only one she needs to actually travel there. That is, Elva travels by having Courtney read the book’s descriptions of the city and its tourist spots. That is, Elva can get lost in the map that she is able to create in her head, of the city according to this travel book. She is able to travel with her dead husband, as she does insist that Courtney travel with them, because she must. 

 

Courtney is resistant to the idea, half the time thinking it all stupid. Until of course she finds herself getting lost in the words too, if not in the fiction that she is allowed to create about that world, where she has legs, where she is young and excited, where she is herself. 

 

Or not. 

 

The premium on imagination

 

Is not just about what is in one’s mind, but is also ultimately about what the hearts of these two women desire. In “Mind’s Eye” that desire is about escape, one more literal than the other, both equally valuable in the task of revealing how much imagination matters, how sometimes it is all we need, if not all that we have. And sometimes that is dangerous in itself.

 

Elva, in her old age, has conceded to what she cannot do anymore, what she has to leave undone. She revels in all the things she knows as a teacher, the worlds she has traveled via literature. She asks this of Courtney upon their meeting: 'You don’t read? You have no poems memorized?' Elva wonders: How do people experience rain, and snow, and life and living, with no poetry in their heads? How do they do that when Elva lives off other writers’ words, and holds them as truths to live by?

 

Courtney meanwhile is just one angry girl, with nothing to do but wallow in her misery. She doesn’t want to be in that room talking to the old lady that is Elva, but she cannot move. She was angry to begin with it seems, no matter the paralyzed legs. But now, stuck with nothing else to do, she can’t but go with Elva on that imaginary trip to Italy. At least it was something to do, and it distracts her from the fact of being tied to her bed, with no future in sight. 

 

But also Courtney’s imagination is different from Elva’s, it is not about being a tourist, or following a map of Italy in one’s head. While Elva wanders through Italy hand-in-hand with her dead husband, while this is about love and romance to her, Courtney’s on a trip all her own. 

 

She is empowered here by the fictions she learns from Elva, by the powerful women like Medusa, the sculpture of whose head they see in a museum in Italy. But also Courtney is made normal by this space in her and Elva’s imaginations. She is walking and young and alive, she is traveling, she has travel companions, if not friends.   

 

To say that Courtney’s imagination goes on overdrive is an understatement. She doesn’t just live in that world, she’d also rather be there. It is not just an alternate universe where she is in Italy, it is a real world where she is free and independent, where she can meet a guy and fall in love, where she is not so much herself, as she does fine a version of self that she believes. 

 

Because the real Courtney is tied to her bed, unable to walk. This version has no hope, and does not think of a future. That real 16-year-old girl in fact lives in the real, because in her imagination she can go crazy, she can burn artwork, turn mean or evil, fall in love, and there are no repercussions.

 

Where Elva had created that imagined world in order to finally fulfill the wish of her dead husband, Courtney had come to believe in that world like it is the only thing she has. While Elva had captured the fun and romance and love that is in traveling with one’s husband, Courtney found reason to live but only in that world.

 

One used the imagination to live beyond her limitations and her regrets. The other used the imagination to escape the demands of the real. 

 

Age and difference

 

Critical to the staging of “Mind’s Eye” is age. 

 

Courtney’s evolution in the play is one that demands much of an actor, where the changes don’t quite happen physically as they do in terms of tone and stance. At certain points Courtney needed to look at that audience with eyes searing, her anger felt across the room, enough to justify her insistence on burning paintings, no matter that it’s in her imagination. 

 

Jamora is unable to do this. She does the bratty 16-year-old, the one who’s pissed off at Elva to the hilt. She does the longing and desire for love, that girl who meets a blind man on the train somewhere in Italy, beautifully and succinctly, too, where one could not but feel sad for her and her imagined world. But the angry teenager, the one who puts things on fire, the one who becomes scary because she is given the power to imagine, Jamora didn’t quite fill that role with truth.

 

And this is problematic because Courtney’s complexity lies in how she shifts between characters in this play, no matter that one is imagined and the other is real. At some point one self takes over the other, and Jamora’s work here doesn’t quite justify that shift. She also lacked the charm that this character needed, given that Courtney still is a teenager tied to a bed. One could not empathize with her, even as one could feel for all her desires revealed in the imagined world. One also wonders what it would be like to actually have a teenager play Courtney, where the youthfulness wouldn’t need to be acted out the way Jamora does here.

 

Ah but Virata was just wonderful. She was perfectly old woman, but more importantly retired teacher, the one who can’t stop talking, the one who sees a young girl and wants her to be more and do more and see more! Virata is in a class all her own here, she has conceded to the end of her life, to the old people’s home, to this stark white room, even as she lives off memories and literature, at the same time that the imagination of Italy allows her to live with love and romance, and no regrets. Virata shifts from wistful to enamored, and when she allows Elva to get lost in the world she creates with Courtney one cannot but get carried away by her joy. When she realizes that Courtney’s gone too far into her imagination, Elva becomes the grandmother—the  parent—that the teenager needs, the parent who had forgotten to care for her, the one who had thought her capable of having an imagination.   

 

Virata shifts from herself to the other that is Courtney, she shifts from her dream world and her real life, she shifts from excited young girl in her memory to adult woman in her imagined world, to old lady in real life, like no one else could on that stage. “Mind’s Eye” is her show. 

 

But also “Mind’s Eye” might be ours. There is a sense here of the value not just of the imagination, but of living, where there is much to read, and many places to go to. Where there are words that can define our lives, but also can bring us elsewhere in the world, even as we might stay where we are. There is value in escape, in leaving, that this play puts a premium on. And more importantly, it speaks of the things that we desire, and how we might get it without sacrificing what is real, what we cannot change. We are being told that the only way to live is to do so in the real, at the same time that we know of the power of the imagined. —KG, GMA News

 

“Mind’s Eye” is by Paul Fleischman, and was staged in early September 2013. It is produced by C. Virata Advisory and Gillian Joyce Virata with the cooperation of Repertory Philippines, RCBC, Jinggo Montenejo and Team Asia. It was directed by Jaime Del Mundo.

 

Katrina Stuart Santiago writes the essay in its various permutations, from pop culture criticism to art reviews, scholarly papers to creative non-fiction, all always and necessarily bound by Third World Philippines, its tragedies and successes, even more so its silences. She blogs at http://www.radikalchick.com. The views expressed in this article are solely her own.