Don’t just watch, Really LOOK

review by Shannon Wu

            Visually stimulating and auditorily energizing, you feel exactly how Christopher overcomes his inner frustration.  The Broadway show performed at the Boston Opera House,  The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime, is a phenomenal presentation of the novel written in 2003 by British writer, Mark Haddon. Mark Haddon’s other work includes The Red House, A Spot of Bother, and a poetry collection, A Talking Horse and the Sad Girl and the Village Under the Sea. He also began to work for television and radio.

            The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime was performed in a proscenium theatre with three balcony levels above the ground floor level.  Audiences’ focus could not leave the amazing set they have created.

            Imagine how difficult it is to relate to an autistic kid’s life. Christopher, the main character of the play, has autism, which causes him difficulty to communicate with others. However, the play uses ways to lead the audiences into Christopher’s train of thoughts and truly relate to the experience of being autistic.

            The play’s most successful effects to communicate Christopher’s inner frustration were the lighting and sound effects that were presented for the emotion. While Christopher was experiencing a rough time, yet did not know how to express his emotion, extreme bright lights and loud, stressful sound effects were displayed to portray his emotion. It was a creative technique to transform emotion into sound and light, which sent a wonderfully clear message of how frustrated Christopher was at the moment.

            There were also many clever directing details involved in this play. One, which would just fly by your mind,  however would come back and hit you in the face, was Christopher building the train tracks throughout the entire first part of the play. Whenever Christopher was in his room alone, he was building a toy train track, which just seemed like a kid playing with toys. At the end of the first part of the play was when Christopher decided to take the train alone to find his mother. The train suddenly began moving on the track as he made the decision. The entire first part of the play was a foreshadowing of Christopher’s journey to his mother. It was also clever considering the toy train track was a gift given to Christopher by his mother.

            The little details here and there were what made this play not only enjoyable, but also impressive with all the thoughts that were put into creating this play.