Blind 'Molly Sweeney' a universal metaphor about loss

Posted 10/13/16

by Hugh Hunter

"Molly Sweeney" (1994) by Brian Friel was not well received in its premiere year. The Irish Heritage Theatre's show is one of several recent productions to give this heady and …

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Blind 'Molly Sweeney' a universal metaphor about loss

Posted

by Hugh Hunter

"Molly Sweeney" (1994) by Brian Friel was not well received in its premiere year. The Irish Heritage Theatre's show is one of several recent productions to give this heady and haunting play a reconsideration.

It is the story of a blind woman, Molly Sweeney, who is offered a chance to recover her eyesight. But Molly is largely content with her present life, already belonging in the world through touch and smell. When she does go through with the operation, it leads to unexpected consequences.

Friel draws on neurologist Oliver Sacks' stories in "To See and Not to See," case studies of people who regained eyesight after having been blind since infancy. Basically, the "cured" eyes now send visual messages the brain cannot process. The patient has to learn to see, and the blaze of color and forms is frightening.

In "Molly" Friel turns science into metaphor, and the set of director Peggy Mecham highlights the isolation of its three characters, two men and a woman. "Molly" is a sequence of dramatic dialogues, as a spotlight falls on the speaker while the other two sit in semi-darkness.

Oddly, you find yourself looking at the still figures as much as the speaker. When Molly (Kirsten Quinn) speaks, the two men are perfectly rigid. But when Molly sits in darkness, you see slight shifts in movement and facial expression, suggesting that only blind Molly is able to hear and connect with the others.

The two men, husband Frank (Ethan Lipkin) and ophthalmologist, Mr. Rice (Michael Toner) sit on either side of her. Scornful of each other, the men are fascinating figures in their own right, almost personifications of comedy and tragedy.

Frank is the comical one, a rascally, romantic and wild-eyed world traveler in perpetual search of the meaningful cause. Underscoring his restlessness, during monologues only Frank flirts with breaking the fourth wall. And when Molly's cure comes a cropper, for the first time he begins to moodily shift in the darkness.

Tragic Mr. Rice is more self-aware. The struggle to find a cure for Molly leads him to relive painful memories of personal and professional failure in a whisky haze. Unlike Frank, he knows he is using Molly to seek personal redemption.

Molly is set in the backwater town of Ballybeg, a fictional Donegal and the site of many Friel plays. In a metaphorical way, "Molly" touches on Friel's concern with the Irish diaspora crisis, with the wandering of Frank and stay-at-home Molly an "unlikely couple," as Dr. Rice observes.

Otherwise, there is nothing especially Irish about either the setting or the play. You could stage "Molly" in Argentina, China or Timbuktu with no great loss of meaning, as Friel seems to be striving for a universal metaphor about the modern world's anomie and sense of loss.

"Molly Sweeney" is running at the Walnut Street Theatre, 825 Walnut St., Studio 5. The show will run through Oct 15. Reservations available on-line at irishheritagetheatre.org

arts