New York Time Theater Review | 'Weights': First Came Sudden Darkness, Followed by
Enlightenment

January 27, 2004
  By ANITA GATES


Lynn Manning is a big guy. He's 6 feet 2 inches and 220 pounds, with the upper arms of a bodybuilder. So you might think "Weights," his touching one-man show, which runs through Feb. 1 at Urban Stages, is a literal reference to gym equipment. But it's about a kind of emotional weight
training that has made it possible for him to live well and happy as a blind man.

In 1978 Mr. Manning was a cocky 23-year-old with a new job and a hot date when he dropped into a Los Angeles bar. He left in an ambulance, having been shot in the head by a stranger who had taken a dislike to him.

His identity in the world's view changed that day, he reflects, from black man to blind man. "From rape-driven misogynist to poor motherless child," he says. And "from`white man's burden' to every man's burden."

Mr. Manning, a playwright and fledgling screenwriter, is a take-charge but affable performer, and his is a poignant story. At 29, his alcoholic mother has nine children and leaves them, including infant twins, alone for a day or two at a time. They end up in foster care. As a teenager Lynn
is sent to a home for troubled boys and is so successfully rehabilitated that he now works there. His dream is to become a painter and work in Paris.

Mr. Manning's point is how well he handles his personal disaster. Three weeks after the shooting a rehabilitation agency refuses him services because, it says, he hasn't gone through the grieving process yet. Yes I have, he says; I'm used to loss, so I'm a fast learner. He's a whiz at Braille and is thrilled to learn how to walk with a cane with the proper coordination of tapping and stepping.

"It feels a little dorky at first, but I catch on," he says. "I've got natural rhythm. I'll figure a way to make it look cool later."

Like others who have lost one of their physical senses, Mr. Manning finds others intensified. "I had never noticed that sound moves the way it does or feels the way it does," he says. "And what about this pulse, this radiation that flows from all things?" It takes a strong person to recognize it.


WEIGHTS

By Lynn Manning; directed by Robert Egan; sound design and musical direction, Gary Bergman; other design and stage manager, Steven White; production manager, Martin Graves. Presented by Theater by the Blind, George Ashiotis and Ike Schambelan, artistic directors. At Urban Stages, 259 West 30th Street, Manhattan.

WITH: Lynn Manning.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/27/arts/theater/27WEIG.html?ex=1076313805&ei=1&en
=8fc7e9ee6e4a93d7

Theater by the Blind  

Artistic Directors George Ashiotis and Ike Schambelan
present
WEIGHTS
Written and Performed by LYNN MANNING

Urban Stages
259 W. 30 St., NYC
Tickets: (212) 868-4444 or www.smarttix.com
Links: www.tbtb.org, www.lynnmanning.com

Directed by ROBERT EGAN
Sound Design, Musical Direction & Live Accompaniment GARY BERGMAN
Designer & Stage Manager STEVEN WHITE
Production Manager MARTIN GRAVES
Press Representative MARK CANNISTRARO

The challenge behind any one-person show, as these are without fail (and without exception, in my experience) monologues about the writer/performer, is to have lived a life that can be made interesting to a neutral third party, to be a writer skilled enough to turn even the most mundane of experiences into gripping theatrical fare, and to be an actor who can convey the events and the words effectively.  For the first time, when faced with Lynn Manning, and his autobiographical WEIGHTS, I find that the usual criteria are beside the point.  His life is full of so many extraordinary events that what Mr. Manning has had to do is make his tales relatable to a mass audience.  No small task, I assure you, but one that he has more than mastered.

Lynn Manning was shot and blinded when he was 23 in a ridiculous bar brawl, but when he tells his personal tale, that night of change seems like just another in a series of battles to be won and challenges to be conquered.  As Mr. Manning tells us in the course of WEIGHTS, his mother had nine children by the time she was 29.  She battled alcohol and several men, and ended up losing her children to the system.  Even so, she kept in touch, and was there to help her son in the first months after he lost his sight.  As a child, Manning faced fear, uncertainty, hunger and the loss of his home.  He never lost his inner strength and spirit though.

Lynn Manning had dreamed of being a painter.  In his youth, years before the incident that took his sight, he realized that the worst thing that could happen to a visual artist was to go blind.  So, he planned ahead, by deciding upon a fallback career, and by practicing doing things with his eyes closed.  Sadly prophetic, his admittedly Murphy's Law philosophy ultimately led him to handle the life-altering experience he had at the tender age of 23 in a way that puzzled doctors, friends and family alike.  Within weeks of the shooting, as recounted in vivid detail in WEIGHTS, Manning was ready to move on, adapt and grow.  He was ready to excel as a writer, his backup plan, and he certainly has.  He has made his fantastic story one that we can all relate to by sharing his rebirth, if you will, as a person with altered senses.  He speaks of mundane difficulties, like re-learning to use the toilet, and beautifully personal moments, like making love for the first time when his greatest guide was touch.  He speaks of many firsts.  He rents an apartment of his own, learns to navigate the streets, to deal with money, and cope with the unsolicited kindness of strangers.  Through it all, we, the captive audience, hang on every word. 

It is Lynn Manning's ability to succeed, to not feel sorry for himself, and to not play the victim that resonates in WEIGHTS.  He remains political and socially astute as he tells his tale.  He poignantly notes that, as a blind man who also happens to be a black man, when he goes out onto the street, at the first sight of his walking stick he immediately turns from "White man's burden to every man's burden."  People try to help, the street corner religious zealots pray for him, and Lynn Manning just keeps on keeping on.

WEIGHTS is recommended viewing.  It is purely adult material in terms of content and dialogue, but it is full of lessons that all of us should learn.  Lynn Manning, by virtue of who he is and what he does, is motivational.  He has created a monologue that is intriguing, engaging, and purely inspirational.  Would that we all had such a will to persevere.  The world would be a different place.

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Weights By Lynn Manning. Dir. Robert Egan.

With Manning. Urban Stages (see Off Broadway).

Lynn Manning once was lost, but now is found; could see, but now is blind. These are the twin narratives that lift Weights, a solo show produced by Theater by the Blind that arrives at Urban Stages after well-received stints in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C.. Manning lost his sight in 1978, at the age of 23, when a petty bar fight escalated into gunfire: (He still has a bullet lodged in his skull) But Weights is no cry for sympathy, and Manning hardly seems to need it. Tall, handsome and powerfully built, he looks much younger than his nearly 50 years, and has accepted his disability with a kind of brash grace. The saddest sections of Weights deal not with blindness but with Manning's harrowing childhood in South Central Los Angeles, when his unstable young mother, an abusive drunkard, would abandon her nine kids for days at a stretch. Manning skips over a central piece of this story--his transformation, before the shooting, from juvenile delinquent to youth counselor--and there are sections of the show, especially toward the beginning, in which the strut of his language seems forced. But there are moments, too, of real eloquence. Manning is most effective when he shifts into freestyle verse, accompanied by a guitarist on the side of the stage: He gives a memorable account of his first romantic experience without sight, navigating his partner's body by touch, from her hair to the back of her knees; and he is rhetorically powerful on the subject of his perceived transformation from black man to blind man, "from 'white man's burden' to every man's burden." In passages such as these, Manning helps the audience to see the world through his own shattered lens.-Adam Feldman

Second sight

"Weights," the story of how writer-performer Lynn Manning lost his vision in a bar fight, is not the tale of adversity you might expect, it's a surprising story about discovery in which going blind can be the best thing that happens to a person. 

By JOSHUA TANZER
Offoffoff.com

Lynn Manning's interesting and often moving one-man play, "Weights," has a dimension that you might not expect from a story about how he went "from black man to blind man." As the L.A.-based writer and performer tells his story — which covers his rough childhood, the shooting that left a bullet in his brain, and his adjustment to life without eyesight, the most striking thing is how much funnier and more cheerful the play is in its second half. Losing his sight changed Manning's life forever, and for the better.

That's the way he tells it, and it could be a psychological prop or a long-nurtured rationalization, but it never feels that way. Still handsome and strongly built in his late 40s, he has had an extensive career as a writer and actor, while not busy competing as blind judo champion of the world.

Manning describes the day in 1978 when he was shot in a bar with a king-sized sense of bravado. Checking out the ladies, thrashing all challengers at pinball, and giving a drunken redneck a righteous pounding, he feels on top of the world. "They don't know the universe has revolved around me all day!" he boasts. "It was the last day of life as I'd known it and I was feeling too good to notice." If his recollection of this day seems outsized and boastful, it also establishes a kind of attitude that carries over to the rest of the story.

Because once his fear is spent in the chaotic hours between the pulling of a gun and his waking up after surgery, he embraces his new reality determined to master it too. It's the same can-do attitude, applied to life instead of just pinball. The people around him treat him, understandably, as fragile and depressed. "Mr. Manning, after a loss such as yours there is a grieving process that you have to go through," a state worker informs him at the Department of Rehabilitation. But he's not depressed, he's excited.

Manning describes his first months without sight as a time of thrilling discovery; the world's sounds, smells and sensations were all new, and new people come into his life. An aspiring artist before the shooting, he describes how he "painted" the memory of people and everyday sights on his mind's canvas to preserve them. Another quite moving passage talks about the strange experience of "seeing" a woman friend for the first time only when they became intimate and his fingers and lips were able to trace her contours. Stories about learning to use a cane; not to mention a bathroom, are both illuminating and funny.

Manning doesn't explore this question explicitly, but what blindness seems to have done is to make him grow up in a hurry. He still seems proud of the headstrong party boy that he was as a sighted 23-year-old, but blindness forced him onto a completely different path. It made him reinvent himself in an environment where the stakes were much more real and practical. Life was stripped bare of its trivia; it was no longer about impressing people in a bar, it was about learning to recognize voices, use money, walk around without bumping into things. And it wasn't just about those things either; it was about seeing himself, other people and his place in the world in a different way. Maybe everyone has to go through this transformation at some point, but not in one sudden, violent jolt. It's no wonder that the day he was shot was the day Manning remembers as the day he came to life.

Sight Unseen

Shot in the eye in a barroom brawl and blinded at the age of 23, a young black male with nothing going for him except an inner fire to express himself finds his salvation in the theater. If you love the theater, this story has got to speak to you. When the show is written by and starring the blind man who still has that bullet lodged in his cranium, you've only got one hope: Please let the show be good! And, thankfully, it is.

The only obscure thing about the show is its title, Weights. We're not sure why writer/star Lynn Manning gave it that title, unless it's meant as a reference to the multitude of obstacles that weighed against his chances for success. Regardless, Manning's lightly poetic, visually resonant writing is the strongest element in this clear and direct autobiographical tale. Manning does an adequate job performing the piece, changing his voice to represent a galaxy of different characters; but there's something studied about his acting, whereas his writing is fluid and elegant. On the other hand, the very fact that he's playing himself gives the work a high level of authenticity.

A production of the Theater by the Blind at Urban Stages, Weights is at its most compelling when Manning reaches the point in his story when he must deal with his new affliction. Learning the technique for walking with a stick, dealing with people who treat him like an invalid, and finally winning the small battles that give him the tools to become an artist -- these scenes are extremely powerful. Robert Egan directs the show thoughtfully, and there's imaginative musical direction and sound design by Gary Bergman. This Theater By the Blind production is definitely worth seeing.