Eyes Wide Open

Published 7:00 am Wednesday, October 10, 2007

With Halloween looming the time is right for a bit of a blood-tingling thrill and the gripping sensations that transpire only in the dark.

Whidbey Island Center for the Arts opens its 11th theater season with “Wait Until Dark,” a mystery thriller by Frederick Knott.

A sinister con-man named Roar and two ex-convicts, Mike and Carlino, are about to meet their match.

The indomitable heroine of the play is Suzy Hendrix, a blind Greenwich Village housewife who becomes the target of three thugs who are searching for a heroin-packed doll her husband transported from Canada as a favor to a woman who has since been murdered.

The trio tries to convince Suzy that her spouse has been implicated in the crime and the only way to protect him is to surrender the doll.

The plot thickens when Suzy refuses to be intimidated and she cleverly turns the tables on her terrorists using her wiles, the help of a young neighbor and her handicap.

For the WICA production, director Henry Hart said he thinks the play is made more thrilling because of its subtleness.

“Knott was quite a good playwright in that he doesn’t hit us over the head with it and there is still some good humor in the play. It makes it more of a good thrill,” Hart said.

Hart is impressed, too, that Knott used a blind woman as the main character.

Jennifer Bondelid has the exhausting task of tackling the role of the sightless Suzy Hendrix. She said it was necessary to do some research for the role.

“I spent quite a bit of time blindfolded in my own home practicing everything I could think of,” Bondelid said.

“Putting the toothpaste on the toothbrush by holding the bristles between thumb and forefinger as a guide; pouring and measuring ingredients for a recipe putting a finger in the cup to feel when it was full; knife skills in the kitchen — pressing not sawing to cut a sandwich; paring carefully; everything that Suzy would have had to learn to do in the year since her accident.”

Bondelid even went into the city with a cane and practiced getting around in public.

“When I was a child I always thought if I lost my sight for any reason my life as it had been would be over,” she said.

“But in getting prepared to play Suzy, I’ve learned that wouldn’t be the case at all. I would have to learn new ways to do things, be better organized — always putting everything back in place — and learn to make mental maps.”

A common misconception about blind people, Bondelid said, is that their other senses are keener in compensation when it’s actually their attention to those senses that is sharper. She worked on learning to pay more attention to hearing, smelling or feeling.

Hart said that his directing style is one of gentle persuasion, and that it’s the reality of the play that makes it work.

“I work always toward reality,” Hart said. “I don’t mess around; I tell the actors that reality is what makes the play scary.”

Knott was ahead of his time when he wrote the play in the mid 1960s. With its themes of drug smuggling, the struggles of the handicapped and blatant violence, audiences in the sixties were