You Can See A Theatre Show In Toronto This Summer But It’s Definitely Not What You Think

Live theatre is making a comeback in Toronto sooner than you think but not how you remember it.

Mirvish is showcasing a Donmar Warehouse production this summer called Blindness, a socially distanced sound installation directed by Walter Meierjohann, the theatre company told Narcity in an email. Award-winning playwright Simon Stephens adapted the story from José Saramago's dystopian novel.

"We had planned to present Blindness in November 2020, but due to the second wave of Covid-19 we weren't able to do it," said David Mirvish in an email. "However, [...] we are more confident than before that we will finally be able to put Blindness on the stage of the Princess of Wales Theatre in August – by which point we will be in step three of the reopening plan."

Blindness is about the rise and "profoundly hopeful end" of a global pandemic, and no, it is not COVID-19. In this story, there is an epidemic of blindness that has spread through a European city. "The government tries to quarantine the contagion by herding the newly blind people into an empty asylum. But their attempts are futile. The city is in panic," wrote the release.

Each performance of Blindness will provide audience members with their own set of sanitized headphones, to create the effect "as if it were physically happening around you, putting you in the centre of the action," Mirvish wrote.

Each show will accommodate 50 people and will run for 75 minutes without an intermission.