Story

 

  • “The Valley of Astonishment” is a wonderful play, displaying the amazing feats of the human mind.

 

  • The play started off describing a Persian man who had returned to his home having lost everything, including an eye and went on talking about how a phoenix dies in a heap of flames and rises again from it’s ashes

 

  • One of the main characters of the play, Sammy Costas, can recall from memory infinite amounts of information, numbers and objects by using mnemonics. It eventually becomes too much for her to handle and she must find a way to forget all the useless information.

 

  • Another subplot focuses on a man who also has synesthesia. Every note of music he hears is accompanied by a color. As he listens to Jazz music, he splashes colors of paint across a large canvas. He has always been intimidated to bring up this condition to other people for fear of being thought of as weird. However, when he learns that there are others like him, he begins to embrace it.

 

  • Moreover, another subplot focuses on a man who had been paralyzed from the neck down, unable to move anything except his head. As time went on, he learned that he could control his body movements by focusing on them with his eyes. Slowly, he learned to stand and then walk and once again live a normal life.

 

  • The last subplot focused on a one-handed card trick artist.

 

  • The play was humorous, thought-provoking, and simply remarkable. It transported us into the minds of people with extraordinary conditions of the brain and, through their narratives, allowed us to feel what they felt and see what they saw with the images they put into our minds.