A Mind Is a Terrible Thing to Take for Granted ‘The Valley of Astonishment,’ by Brook and Estienne
Ben BrantleySeptember 20, 2014: Everything comes wrapped in silence in The Valley of Astonishment, Peter Brook and Marie-Hélène Estienne’s wonder-struck contemplation of the enigma of the human mind, which opened on Thursday night at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center in Brooklyn. A shimmer of stillness seems to surround every word spoken, every gesture made, every note sounded in this essayistic work about extraordinary sensory perceptiveness. What’s created is not exactly a barrier between the audience and the stage, but what might be called a zone of thoughtfulness. An implicit request fills this silence: Think about how you think. Try to feel out, if you can, the way you feel. Long before mindfulness became the watchword du jour, Mr. Brook, perhaps the most influential of all living stage directors, was exploring theater as a means of magnifying the essential elements of daily existence and to find the vastness within. In an interview in 1995, he said his goal was to make audiences “look at something they’ve taken for granted since they were born, which is a mind, as if it were a great dawn or Everest.”
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