Molly Sweeney can identify dozens of plants by touch, catch a lie in a familiar voice and dance ecstatically through a crowd without disturbing a hair. Because she lost much of her eyesight when she was 10 months old — except, crucially, her ability to discern light from dark — Molly has developed keen powers of sensory perception.
Sure-footed though she is, the title character in “Molly Sweeney,” now running at the Irish Repertory Theater, is treated like a pawn by two men who can’t see beyond their own self-interests. That’s one of several conspicuous paradoxes explored in Brian Friel’s 1994 confessional drama, the final installment of the theater’s season devoted to the playwright’s work.
Like Friel’s more often revived “Faith Healer,” “Molly Sweeney” is told through a series of monologues addressed to the audience. All three characters, who remain onstage throughout, narrate their subjective recollections of a six-month span (the year is unspecified; the setting is Ballybeg, Friel’s fictional Irish hamlet). But only one of them can speak with unbiased clarity on the central occurrence: what happened when a doctor tried to restore Molly’s sight.
Friel’s extraordinary hand with vivid prose is especially evident in Molly’s version of events. Played with a poised sense of wonder by Sarah Street, Molly recalls relishing in the beautiful details of a world she had no need of seeing. The idea for an eye operation came from her husband Frank, played by John Keating with the frazzled intensity of a mad scientist. A dilettante prone to colorful tangents, he sees Molly as an object of fascination and a personal cause. Molly’s egocentric ophthalmologist, Mr. Rice (Rufus Collins), considers her a potential miracle patient who might revive his career.
Directed by Charlotte Moore, this production is faithful to the author’s stated preference for minimal staging (the program quotes Friel’s disinterest in “concept or interpretation”). That puts the focus squarely on the three actors, who do fine work illuminating Friel’s descriptive language, particularly Street and Keating as spouses who gravely misjudge each other. The performers are confined to their thirds of the stage, sparse but for a chair and window each (the set is by Charlie Corcoran), while mottled blue-and-violet lighting (by Michael Gottlieb) creates an impression of a developing field of vision.
Friel’s characterizations of the two men receive excess weight (a subplot about the doctor’s wife running off with a rival feels superfluous), which seems partly by design but also like the structure of the story betraying its subject. It’s frustrating to listen to Molly’s husband and her doctor rattle on about her while she sits with the quiet grace of a Pietà, slumping further in her seat as the show approaches the end of its 2 hours and 15 minutes. If this is a retrospective account of her fate, Molly’s own words are increasingly the only ones of any dramatic interest, but she remains outnumbered.
The idea that a blind person can have a rich view of the world — that “seeing isn’t understanding” — is framed here as a major philosophical revelation. Partly inspired by a case study by the physician and writer Oliver Sacks, “Molly Sweeney” has the forensic tone of an observer whose discoveries can seem condescending toward people with disabilities, by assuming that life without a disability would be preferable. This might explain why Molly herself is a slippery character to grasp: acutely attuned to the world around her but somehow uncertain of her own mind. “Of course I wanted to see,” Molly recalls without much conviction. It seems like a lack of imagination not to consider that she might have felt otherwise.
Molly Sweeney
Through June 30 at Irish Repertory Theater, Manhattan; irishrep.org. Running time: 2 hours 15 minutes.
