By Cal LaFauci, Belmont Voice correspondent
Belmont resident Eliza Barmakian ran through her blocking during a Saturday morning rehearsal at the Greater Boston Stage Company with her lines memorized and her guide dog, Zinga, resting peacefully at the stage manager’s feet. She did not feel nervous. Like the character she’s playing, Barmakian lives with limited vision.
Despite growing up with aniridia—a rare genetic condition that causes severe light sensitivity and reduced vision—Barmakian pursued a career in theater. Now, as one of the two actresses playing the lead in this production of “Wait Until Dark,” she hopes to show audiences the resilience of people with limited vision.
“I’ve come to really see my blindness as something that gives me strength and character,” she said. “Of course, it’s not who I am fully, but it definitely has impacted my life, and so I am very excited to be taking on a role that is really showcasing a blind person in the spotlight.”
Barmakian showed independence from a young age. She navigated the world without needing extra support until kindergarten, when the school brought in a contracted teacher from the Perkins School for the Blind to add accommodations to her classroom. The instructor tried to incorporate technology into every part of her learning experience, even though she did not need it most of the time. That’s when Barmakian realized she was different from her classmates.
“[My classmates] thought the technology that I had was pretty cool,” Barmakian said. “But I always thought, ‘I hate that I’m different.’ ”
She recoiled against the changes. She pushed herself to fit in with her classmates by playing soccer, hanging out with friends, and reading paperback books to prove that her blindness could not prevent her from being a normal kid.
“I always thought that pushing myself to the x degree would make me stronger,” she said. “Little did I know, the thing that was going to be harder was accepting who I was, as opposed to straining to read a nine-point font.”
While developing a sense of self, Barmakian discovered a love of music and storytelling by watching “High School Musical.” In her room she sang “When There Was Me and You” along with the main character Gabriella, feeling like a princess in a tower aching to be with her prince. At other times she danced around the house to Taylor Swift and Justin Bieber CDs.
“I didn’t even know what song was gonna come on next, but I always thought about it as, ‘This song is telling a story’,” she said. “When I was exposed to theater in seventh grade, I started to think, ‘Oh well, I’ve been doing that thing in my room. . . that’s the same thing they’re doing up there. I can do that.’ ”
She tried theater for the first time in eighth grade and has not stopped since.
Toward the end of high school and into her time attending Providence College, Barmakian’s vision deteriorated further, the result of corneal erosion that clouded her sight.
When she began feeling less safe when crossing the street, Barmakian reconsidered whether fitting in was worth the work. She switched to larger texts, read things digitally, used a cane for a few years, and was eventually paired with Zinga.
None of these changes prevented her from performing. Between biology labs at Providence, she took acting electives and participated in as many extracurricular productions as she could. After earning a biology degree in 2024—a dual product of her interest in the subject and her parents’ insistence on having a backup plan to theater—she decided to try acting full-time.
“It was a now-or-never kind of thing,” Barmakian said. “I decided to try it out in the Boston area, since it’s much less competitive and anxiety-ridden than just picking up and going to New York.”
Her family supported her immediately.
“When she graduated with the biology degree, she did what we asked,” said her mother Beth Barmakian. “So, at that point, when she said, ‘I really want to pursue this,’ I was like, ‘Now’s the time to do it.’ ”
Barmakian began rehearsals for “Wait Until Dark” on Feb. 10.
“The process has, with a few exceptions, felt very similar to a typical rehearsal process,” director Weylin Symes said. “There are a couple moments just making sure Eliza feels safe if there’s some fight choreo, but that’s true of anyone.”
After a week of rehearsal, Barmakian understood her similarities and differences with her character. She dealt with insecurities about her visual impairment early in life while her character Susan Hendrix, who was recently blinded in a car crash, still feels the burden a year and a half after the accident. Barmakian has limited vision, while Hendrix is blind.
There are other differences between her portrayal of the character, and the version played by Jenny S. Lee, the other lead actress.
“It reads differently when we both play the role,” Barmakian said. “I think that allows for this opportunity to see that blind people are different. They’re not this one singular thing.”
Working with Barmakian influenced how Symes thought about Hendrix.
“What I keep realizing is if Eliza weren’t in the show, oddly enough, I think I would be directing Jenny to be more timid or more hesitant … than she is,” Symes said.
Watching Barmakian perform during her rehearsal time influenced Lee’s portrayal of the character.
“By being the funny, brilliant, strong person that she is, [Eliza] gives us so much permission to play Susan with equal amounts of brilliance and complexity and strength,” Lee said. “I feel like there’s an instinct a lot of the time to play a character with a disability with less strength. But I think there’s no question that this is just a part of who [Susan] is. She’s equally brilliant and complicated.”
That strength and complexity are exactly what Barmakian hopes to show in her performances.
“For so long, there’s often been this idea that if you are disabled, you are lesser than,” she said. “I hope that people come out of this show feeling like, ‘blind people can do that,’ kind of thing.”
She hopes she can inspire other visually impaired individuals to pursue what they love, with a little less insecurity about their disability.
“I think this show is an opportunity for me to give light to the strength that there is in being blind,” she said. “If I can be up there on this stage, I can give another little girl sitting there, who might be listening during an audio-described performance, the strength to say, ‘I can keep going.’ ”
Cal LaFauci is a journalism student in BU’s newsroom program, a partnership between the university, The Belmont Voice and other news organizations in the Boston area.
