Theater Review—

‘Molly Sweeney’ A Great Season Opener For Long Wharf

By Julie Stern

NEW HAVEN — For over twenty years, The Irish Repertory Theatre has worked to bring Irish and Irish-American works to American audiences. Now its two founding members, Ciaran O’Reilly and Charlotte Moore, have collaborated in putting together a stunning opening production OF Brian Friel’s  Molly Sweeney for Long Wharf Theatre’s new season.

Based on a New Yorker medical case study by neurologist Oliver Sacks, Friel’s play is doubly rooted in the Irish tradition of story telling, and the medical essayists technique of presenting a complex saga of unexpected consequences. Molly Sweeney tells of a woman, blind since infancy, who agrees to an operation that may restore her sight — not because she herself wants that, but to please her husband, and resurrect the career of the opthalmologist who will perform the surgery.

With her mother in and out of mental hospitals during her childhood, Molly was raised by her doting father to be confident and independent. A local magistrate who loved flowers, he encouraged his daughter to develop her other senses to the point where she was completely comfortable in the darkness, imagining a world that was rich and wonderful. He taught her to orient herself in their garden by using sound, smell and touch,  continually challenging her to tell him correctly where she was and what flowers she was “looking” at.  She grew up to be a champion swimmer, had a wide circle of friends, and supported herself as a massage therapist at the local health club.

Frank Sweeney, who met her at the club and married her when she was 39, was an energetic, unemployed auto-didact, who bounced from one dream to another, working as a volunteer in Africa, raising goats for cheese, and studying at the public library. When he fell in love with Molly, he took on her blindness as his newest project, researching her condition, and searching for a cure. This led him to Mr Rice, a once prominent eye surgeon whose life and career disintegrated after his wife left him for a colleague.

While the doctor is not at all sure that the operation will work, he is convinced by Frank to take Molly’s case, in part because she reminds him of his lost wife, and more importantly, because it would be “the chance of a lifetime” to perform a medical miracle and restore his reputation. Although Molly herself has no desire to change her life by becoming “sighted,” she agrees to undergo the procedure, in part to please Frank, and also to encourage Rice, because she could “see” how much it meant to both of them.

Locked in his alcoholic soaked depression, Rice’s inability to function is directly opposite to Molly’s capacity to live a full life, and in trying to help her, he is really hoping to cure himself, and regain his ability to “perform.” However, the outcome of the surgery and the effect it has on all three protagonists is totally unexpected, as physical blindness becomes a metaphor which casts a new interpretation on what it means to “see” and “not see.”

The structure of the play, like the setting, is bare and abstract. The characters take turns telling the story in dramatic monologues, so that they never interact with one another. This works, in part because of Friel’s compelling language, and even more because of the persuasive talent of the performers.

Under Charlotte Moore’s direction, Simone Kirby as Molly is never out of character as a blind woman, but through her voice and uplifted face she radiates joy, love, pride, confusion, and fear.

Ciaran O’Reilly is all brogue and bluster as the irrepressible Frank, buoyed up with optimism over each new plan and discovery, whether it be the fellow called Aristotle he learned about from a philosopher, or the possibilities of the African honeybee, or his certainty that he can engineer a miracle for the woman he loves.

As Mr Rice, whose life has deteriorated from the pinnacle when he was one of the world’s greatest eye surgeons, Jonathan Hogan is clipped and civil, but rueful in his realization of his own losses. His gradual recognition of his own motives and responsibilities rings with all the honesty and self-knowledge that Frank lacks, and may never know.

Including a 15-intermission the play is nearly two hours long, but it seems to go by in a flash because you are so absorbed in the power of the words, and the emotional depth of the stories that unfold. It is definitely a great start to the Long Wharf year.

(Performances continue through October 16. See the Enjoy Calendar, in print and online, or visit www.LongWharf.org for curtain and ticket details).