Molly Sweeney
By Brian Friel. Directed by Mort Kaplan. Set design by Susan E. Sanders. Costumes by Molly Trainer. Lighting by Dina Gjertsen. Original music by Barry Wyner. With Paula Plum, Michael T. McNamara, and Paul O’Brien. At Gloucester Stage Company, Wednesday through Sunday through June 24.

A thousand TV movies notwithstanding, Molly Sweeney is proof that a medical case history can be turned into metaphor rather than melodrama. Irish playwright Brian Friel’s lyrical composition of interspersed monologues tells the tale of 41-year-old Molly Sweeney, whose journey from blindness to partial vision tests our definition of sight. Even her wired husband, Frank, bursting with “the indiscriminate enthusiasms of the self-taught,” has boned up on “the relationship between vision and knowledge, between seeing and understanding” that is at the core of the play.

Like Friel’s masterpiece, Faith Healer (which Gloucester Stage mounted in a strong production several summers ago that starred two of the actors on view here), Molly Sweeney is a tapestry of monologues. In interwoven turns, Molly’s story is told by the title character, the serially crusading husband for whom curing his wife’s blindness is but the latest cause, and the once-brilliant, now alcoholic eye surgeon who performs the operations that bring Molly’s satisfying tactile world into hectoring, unnerving focus.

In Gloucester, under Mort Kaplan’s direction, the play’s chamber-musical structure is underlined by the Irish-tinged compositions of Barry Wyner (who’s particularly effective at suggesting the mental cacophony sudden, imperfect vision proves for Molly). Kaplan has made judicious cuts. Susan E. Sanders provides a standard but effective setting, with Molly upstage on a garden bench and her husband and doctor occupying chairs farther front, the composition backed by three frames in which the yellowish blurs of Molly’s sightless world dapple the stage magically while the sharper images of “reality” seem clinical. And the accomplished team of Paula Plum, lilting and embracing as Molly, and Paul O’Brien, his Frank as in-your-face as a bounding dog, is rounded out by Michael T. McNamara as the disappointed surgeon who restores Molly’s vision more to revivify his own confidence and reputation than to fix her. For in the view of Molly Sweeney, she isn’t broken.

Inspired by the Oliver Sacks case history “To See and Not See,” the 1994 Molly Sweeney is set, like most of Friel’s works, in the fictional Ballybeg of County Donegal — a sort of Celtic Yoknapatawpha. Molly, the daughter of a judge and his mentally unstable wife, and blind since infancy, is a native. So is Frank, though his chain of animatedly championed lost causes has taken him to Nigeria and off the Mayo coast for a failed attempt at harvesting cheese from Iranian goats. Rice has retreated to the provincial burg from the great world, where he was once a “rogue star” of ophthalmology — before his wife ran off with a colleague and he entered into a rebound romance with the bottle. In the contrapuntal recounting of these three, Friel sets up a lively poetic meditation on perception in its many forms. True, the play buys too heavily into the Sacks/Equus theory that impairments, whether physiological or psychological, carry innate gifts. But the allegory, with its play of darkness and light, is artfully developed, and both characters and language ring with a life that belies the arguably static spliced-monologue form.

Frank, in particular, is a fascinatingly flawed and winning sort — if in some ways blinder than his wife. And following Molly’s initial vivid discourse on a childhood spent memorizing flora by feel and Rice’s recollection of his initial meeting with the couple, O’Brien bursts out of the shadows like bombastic foam from an aerosol can, moving engagingly if haplessly from his foreshadowing tale of the Iranian goats who couldn’t adjust to Irish time to a tumble of philosophic commentary on the connections between the sequentially perceived tactile world and the one that vision thrusts upon us. With gestures as big as Frank’s theories, O’Brien captures all the hearty thoughtlessness of a man who means well. As Molly, Plum gives a studied, knowing performance that grounds the blind Molly, marries accommodation to discord as the guinea-pig Molly (her body rejecting visual signals like a bad transplant), and, in the end, projects the cheery pathos of an exile seeking refuge on the blurred border between fantasy and fact. Essaying the role enacted on Broadway by Jason Robards, McNamara isn’t quite in their league, but his character is the most schematic, and he keeps the ball in play when it’s in his corner.

Issue Date: June 14-21, 2001