“I DON’T know why you people have to go to the movies,” the man had barked. “You won’t get anything out of it anyway.”The “you people” was the blind in general and Vicky Winslow (pictured) in particular. The man at the cinema some time ago hadn’t cared for her way of watching: with her ears, and a friend’s whispered puffs of description.On a recent evening at a Broadway theater, she had a different approach. She was swathed in a brooch-fastened cape, sitting above her trusty German shepherd, Jet, ready to take in “The Lion King” — and etching a mental picture of Simba and his savanna with the help of a single foam-wrapped earpiece that made a noisy whisper buddy unnecessary.It was several minutes before 8, and the audience was chattering and waiting. But for Ms. Winslow, 51, the show had already begun. Her ear was filling with advance word of what others would learn only later: the color of Zazu’s feathers, the bounce in Simba’s dreadlocks. It was important to stock up on character descriptions now, to permit a focus on plot later. She savored each description the way some people sip wine, holding it for a time, swirling it in consideration.The voice’s description of Simba’s golden belt made her laugh. When it mentioned a wooden lion head in the theater, she said, “Oh, I’d like to see that!”The theater can feel forbidding and overwhelming even to those with five senses. But in recent years an experiment on Broadway started testing whether theater’s thrills can be extended to patrons who see with their ears. A service called D-Scriptive translates the visual language of raised eyebrows, waist-high leg kicks and soft kisses into the language of sound. An evening with Ms. Winslow suggested that a show digested this way isn’t without its pleasures.Fostering that pleasure takes technological trickery. Because every live performance is slightly different, playing a single audio track wouldn’t work: before long, the action would outrun or lag the description on the tape. D-Scriptive solved the problem by dicing up its narration — into more than 600 audio files in the case of “The Lion King.” An individual file, or cluster of them, is assigned to a particular cue given by the theater’s stage manager. After an actor utters a certain line, for example, the manager speaks the next cue into the microphone, which in turn tips off D-Scriptive’s computer to broadcast the corresponding bit of explanation to its patrons’ earpieces: “On the left are two giraffes and a cheetah”; “Rafiki holds the cub up to the bright light once more.”D-Scriptive, initiated in 2006 with “Wicked,” is now available at six shows on Broadway, with more in the pipeline. Theatergoers used the service 2,717 times last year, 541 of those for “The Lion King,” according to Carl Anthony Tramon, director of special services for Sound Associates, the company behind D-Scriptive. Leased by the theaters, the service is free for users.The first time Ms. Winslow tried the system, to take in “Jersey Boys,” she was hooked. “The details that they gave were things that no one else — not even people who know me and describe things to me — would think to tell me,” she said. And, she noted, causing a disturbance on Broadway is even worse than at the cinema: “Remember, unlike the movies, you’ve paid an awful lot for your seat and you can’t just go look for another one.”A few seats down from her, Kirk Brouwer, 15, a sophomore at St. Joseph Regional High School in Montvale, N.J., had his own reasons for loving the service. He had his first eye surgery at one week old and has had 300 or so operations since then; today his left eye has no vision and his right eye has 20/100 vision with glasses (enough to gaze into his cellphone from up close and to pursue his passion for shooting and editing videos). It used to be that whenever he went to a show with his family, he said, his three younger brothers would discuss it on the ride home and he would remain silent. Sitting beside his mother on this night, he said the descriptions helped him socially by giving him something to toss into conversations with family and friends. For his mother, Eileen, it was a short break from her usual habit of describing every last thing around them, “to be sure Kirk doesn’t miss any details in life,” she said.As “The Lion King” began, Mr. Brouwer and Ms. Winslow were already full of information. The challenge facing them was to hold these descriptions in their heads, listening to D-Scriptive’s account of the action in one ear and following the music and dialogue heard by everyone with the other ear.If the sighted theatergoer has the luxury of being in the moment during a show, the partly or fully blind patron must enjoy it differently. The descriptions preload in the brain before the show begins, the progressive narration of dance kicks and kisses tends to come several seconds before the actual deeds, and the dialogue arrives last. Assembling a mental picture of a scene often requires that information heard at several different moments be merged.Sometimes Ms. Winslow laughed in sync with the crowd; sometimes the D-Scriptive failed to relay a funny bit and the crowd laughed without her; sometimes the audio description was funnier than the visual action, and she laughed all by herself. She was more sensitive to wordplay than most, chuckling alone when Pumbaa the warthog spoke of a sandwich “with a side of flies.” That’s easy enough compared to what she used to do as a social worker in a homeless shelter, using her ears to sense when tears had rimmed a client’s eyes and a tissue box needed extending.“There are some things that eyesight would give me,” said Ms. Winslow, who was born blind. “But I hear things that other people don’t because they’re not focused on hearing.”There was too much to hear at times. The words and images beamed through the earpiece sometimes came at her like digital machine-gun fire. A song about not being able to wait to be king was especially overloaded, with seemingly every dance step and twirl itemized. So it goes when a thronging boulevard of a performance must be jammed into the single lane of auditory perception.Ms. Winslow, though, has ways of coping. “My mind sort of censors for what I’m interested in,” she said.It was another story with her immediate neighbor to the right — me. Just as the houselights went down, she leaned over and issued a gentle order: “Close your eyes.” It was an invitation to try to know something of her experience that night, and for that I had also secured one of the devices.At first, I found myself cheating without intending to, keeping eyes closed during run-of-the-mill descriptions but opening them when something sounded especially beautiful. Later I lasted through full scenes in the way that Ms. Winslow had asked. To try to process it all was to understand that a Broadway show is, in the end, a giant information ball, a dense nugget made of millions of disparate kinds of facts. Seeking to turn them all into verbal facts is a heroic intention that can never be fully realized.At one point actors in hyena costumes entered the theater from the back of the house and walked right past Ms. Winslow. She perked up as she felt their presence, with the earpiece revealing what they were. Her guide dog didn’t need to be warned about hyenas. Jet, ordinarily possessed of a New Yorker’s seen-everything cool, leapt up, snapped to attention and seemed to place himself on war paws — because, well, hyenas.Ms. Winslow wouldn’t mind if services like D-Scriptive popped up for other arts. “I don’t do ballet, because that would be pointless,” she said. But she loves the opera and loves the movies, which is what she can afford mostly, being out of a job and the economy being what it is nowadays.“I sometimes feel like asking for half of my money back, because I miss a lot,” she said.She has heard of apps that seek to do for films what D-Scriptive does for Broadway shows. She’s skeptical. “I’ll believe it when I do it,” she said.
