Theater Review by Samuel L. Leiter . . . .
Molly Sweeney, by the great Irish playwright Brian Friel, is a sensitively crafted, verbally rich, but dramatically challenged and overlong (two hours and 20 minutes) play about the clash between physical and moral blindness. Only five years after a fine Off-Broadway revival by the Keen Company, it’s being given yet another solid revival by the Irish Repertory Theatre as the last offering in their Friel Project, a season of four Friel plays, the others being Translations, Aristocrats, and Philadelphia, Here I Come; each is set in the fictional Irish town of Ballybeg, County Donegal. Originally produced at Dublin’s Gate Theatre in 1994, this unconventional, three-character work had its New York premiere in 1996, starring Jason Robards, Catherine Byrne (from the Dublin cast), and Alfred Molina (in his New York debut).
Molly Sweeney was inspired by an Oliver Sacks case study, “To See and Not See,” published in The New Yorker in 1993, and reprinted in Sacks’s 1995 An Anthropologist on Mars. His account concerns the pseudonymous Virgil, a 50-year-old Midwesterner, blind since childhood with cataracts and a condition called retinitis pigmentosa. Able to see light and dark and discern movement before his eyes, his condition convinced an ophthalmologist that Virgil’s sight could be restored. This so excited Virgil’s fiancée, she urged him to do the operation.
It succeeded, and the rarity of a blind person gaining sight was duly celebrated . . . until it wasn’t. Virgil struggled with the frightening adjustments his new ability required, his very capacity to understand what he was seeing being seriously tested because he lacked the experience to recognize the world around him.
Friel changed Virgil’s story by moving it to Ballybeg, where the blind, 41-year-old Molly (Sarah Street) is married to Frank Sween (John Keating). Molly is perfectly content to depend on her other senses, especially that of touch, even enjoying the pleasures of swimming and dancing.
Frank, an obsessive autodidact stuffed with both practical and arcane knowledge, including philosophy, has no steady employment. He either experiments with offbeat ventures, like making cheese from Iranian goats (a flop because their inner clocks continue to exist on Iranian time), or going off on good-works adventures, like saving the whales or delivering goods to Ethiopia.
Convinced there’s a chance his recent bride can see again, he persuades Mr. Rice (Rufus Collins), a once-leading ophthalmologist, to operate. Mr. Rice, whose career has declined since his wife left him, sees the operation as a chance to regain his reputation. Both he and Frank, for all their good intentions, are more concerned with satisfying their own altruistic objectives than the complete well-being of Molly, who goes along mainly because of Frank’s fervor. Not only does Molly’s newfound vision begin to fail, however, but neurological complications lead to a tragic breakdown.
The story’s basis in actuality—greatly altered as it is—provides Friel with a powerful basis for speculation on the issues involved. He dramatizes these, though, not in conventional terms but as monologues distributed among his characters, none of whom ever addresses the others as they move about or sit on Charlie Corcoran’s simple, three-walled set, which is little more than three narrow sections of wall placed behind three different types of chair, each wall piece having a different type of window.
Seen in the spaces between the walls is a neutral background on which Michael Gottlieb’s expert lighting casts colorful atmospherics. Linda Fisher’s costumes are all suitable, especially Molly’s long skirt which flares perfectly when she does a bit of dancing (heightened by Hidenori Nakajo’s sound design).
Mr. Rice is placed before the left wall, Molly is before the center wall, and Frank is on the right. Under Charlotte Moore’s always perceptive staging, the actors find multiple interesting ways to occupy their spaces, both sitting and standing, but never crossing into someone else’s space or even showing awareness of them. For all that, and despite the actors’ intelligence and presence, not to mention Friel’s lyrical gifts, the play’s structure inevitably invites tedium.
Another Friel play, Faith Healer, also has three characters speaking in monologues, but those aren’t intercut with the others as are the ones in Molly Sweeney. All dialogue is contained within the speeches, with the speakers quoting others’ words. (A rather similar structure requiring three actors delivering monologues supported another Irish Rep production, Elaine Murphy’s Little Gem, seen in 2019.) Although well performed, with emotional and rhetorical brio, the work, more like a radio than a stage play, frequently drags as the wordy passages accumulate. Without the give and take of inter-character discourse, what might have worked in 90 minutes grows static, especially when Frank and Mr. Rice expostulate on digressive issues.
Molly Sweeney is an actor’s playground for these Irish Rep stalwarts. Collins makes Mr. Rice persuasively authoritative, if not notably guilt-ridden. The bushy-haired Keating infuses the enthusiastic Frank with vibrant loquacity. And the compelling Street gives the openhearted Molly a likable and lifelike persona for whom we both rejoice and grieve.
Molly Sweeney is reminiscent of Mark Medoff’s Children of a Lesser God, which deals with deafness, in validating the right of impaired individuals to exist on their own terms rather than conform to the wishes of the non-impaired. For anyone who might have wondered why a blind person might not so readily benefit from being given sight, Molly Sweeney can be an eye-opener.
Molly Sweeney. Through June 30 at the Irish Repertory Theatre (132 West 22nd Street, between Sixth and Seventh Avenue). www.irishrep.org
Photos: Carol Rosegg