To See or Not to See
2007-09-26
Molly Sweeney, by the Irish playwright, Brian Friel, is a drama about an unusual reversal of fortune. Its eponymous heroine, blind for 35 years since infancy, starts having serious problems when her vision is restored, not before. The play opened originally at Dublin's Gate Theatre in 1991, and made its New York debut in 1995. Friel is also the author of the beautifully crafted Dancing at Lughnasa.
The three-person drama is inspired by the insights about patients in similar predicaments documented by the neurologist and polymath, Dr. Oliver Sacks, especially in his sixth tome, An Anthropologist on Mars. Sacks is noted for the searching and caring manner he explores the inner world of neurologically compromised persons. He has revealed the disorienting effects on the blind of surgeries that provide them with a sense modality they are ill prepared to rely on, having depended in the past only on other channels of information about their world. In Molly's case, the handicap is so connected to her sense of personal identity as well as that of her husband Frank, and her surgeon Mr. Rice, that all three are movingly altered by what they believed would be a beneficial change for her.
Molly may have lost her sight, but her husband Frank and Paddy Rice are also big time losers in their own way. The latter is an alcoholic who has lost his medical reputation and family. Although a physician, he is called Mr. Rice: even his professional moniker is forfeited as a sign of his demoted status. The former is an unemployed dreamer without a mission in life, an individual who has flitted from project to project without any enduring commitment. Both men see restoring Molly's vision as an opportunity for their own self-redemption. Even Molly remarks, "it is so important to them." The crowning irony of her cure is that she cannot cope with the complexity of newly acquired sight. It is too unmanageable and depressing to handle effortlessly.
While Molly is playwright Friel's fictional creation, she seems to be an extreme case of the difficulties patients experience when sight is restored after a lifetime of blindness. The ordeal they undergo is usually a checkered affair, varying from complete confusion on negotiating aspects of a new sensory world to a growing, if labored facility at managing the task. For example, Dr. Sacks' actual patient, Virgil a 50 year-old with congenital cataracts the neurologist saw in 1991 (like Molly, he had a background as a massage therapist), found it easy after surgery to read letters, but impossible to read words or sentences. He responded immediately to colors, and was more adept at fitting geometric shapes into appropriate slots on a board, than he was at recognizing three dimensional representations of the same objects.
Sacks may be a bit misleading when he concludes "was not experience necessary to see? Did one not have to learn to see?" The challenge for hitherto sightless persons may not be learning to see an outside world, but integrating visual perceptions of it with information conveyed through other sense modalities like the tactile, auditory, and olfactory modes. While the task can be a daunting one for the formerly sightless, any conceivable learning is dependent upon seeing in the first place. The challenge seems to be managing, not creating, a visual world. All the same, Molly Sweeney celebrates the epiphany at the beginning of Oliver Sack's book: "Ask not what disease the person has, but rather what person the disease has."
In Molly Sweeney, three characters present their stories as individual monologues that are nonetheless interwoven thematically. The director of this production, Richard Pettibone, a seasoned talent at Theater-works, has Jackie Decho-Holm as Molly, James Hipp as her husband Frank, and John Taylor as the surgeon Mr. Rice, put in heroic efforts to sustain interest in a domestic narrative that begins to wear a bit thin, and not because of any failing on the part of the director or his performers. It is Friel's play that falters at sustaining interest. Despite the complications introduced by Molly's restored sight, there is not enough dramatically challenging substance in the drama to last its entire length. To compensate for this, Friel tries to flesh out the dialogue by undertaking detours into the foibles of each character. These may be engaging and at times humorous, like Molly's communicating her delight in swimming or identifying flowers, Frank's disappointments in the yield of his Iranian goats, his courtship of Molly, or his impatience with a behavioral psychologist, and Paddy Rice's recounting his fall from professional and marital grace. Yet they all seem more like time fillers than essential components of dramatic purpose.
There is nonetheless a thing of haunting beauty about the play that is an important aspect of the lives of each of its three characters. As you listen carefully to them, this facet becomes apparent: "those dead fires," "the dread of exile," "the desolation of homesickness," "gifts abundantly mine," "sudden sparrows in the garden," "phantom desires," "small unexpected joys," "luminous sights and wonderful spectacles," "the far end of tomorrow," "blustery mornings," "high summers." Indisputably, the expressive language in all three characters envelops us, and is indelibly a Brian Friel thing—whatever play he authors. It is a uniquely Irish thing.
Director Pettibone makes the most of whatever staging is possible in three rather static monologues, and his cast, even down to finished Irish brogues, does its best to bring Friel's characters to life. Special mention should also be made of the coaching skills of Paula Anderson and Sonnie Osborne, who walked the players through technical aspects of their characterizations. Finally, the production was enhanced by the musical score for the violin composed and played by Shrdlu, New Milford's own one-man band and troubadour. His plaintive string compositions accentuate the action of the play, bringing us closer to its somewhat overstretched heart.