Molly Sweeney

Molly Sweeney

These words you're reading now, you're able to draw meaning from them because you can see them. A simple fact but true. Without sight, you'd have no unmediated access to them on the page or computer screen, no means for your other senses to make sense of them. They'd be lost to you, along with many other things in our highly visual culture. So much of our communication is based in the seen – light, color, motion, the printed word – that vision is as precious to us as gold. Being without it is, the sighted feel, a kind of poverty, one we would relieve were it in our power. But in giving sight to the blind, might we not be taking something away?

In this elegiac Brian Friel drama, the title character has had almost no vision since infancy, but in the 40 years since, she has adapted quite well to the situation. She navigates through the world by scents and sounds, gathers knowledge of its creatures and creations by touch. Molly Sweeney has come to be at home in her sightlessness – comfortable and confident and serene in the way one is in one's home. But her husband, convinced that her condition can be remedied, takes her to an eye surgeon who is willing to operate on her. Having fallen from the peak of his profession to a whiskey-soaked middle age, the surgeon sees in Molly a chance to restore both her sight and his own reputation. His operation succeeds, but Molly loses far more than she gains; the rush of unfamiliar stimuli overwhelms her, swamps her other senses, her confidence and comfort, cutting her off from the world – from her way of knowing the world – more than her blindness ever did.

The use of sight and blindness as metaphors has such a long tradition in literature that Friel might seem to be working overly familiar territory, spinning just another minor variation on the moral that there are none so blind as those who will not see. But as is often the case with this playwright, he captivates us not so much with the tale he tells as with its telling. He lays it out in the past tense, as a story that's already taken place, related by the three principals – Molly, husband Frank, and the surgeon, Mr. Rice – in separate but interlocking monologues. The tone is reflective, with shades of regret but also a wisdom that comes from being on the far side of an incident and reviewing it – yes, seeing it again – in its entirety, whole. It's a simple approach, and yet that simplicity makes all the difference.

Karen Sneed, who directed this Different Stages production, knows how richness, color, and nuance can bloom from simplicity. She puts the story first, keeping her three actors focused on a clear telling of it, their delivery straightforward, their individual parts of the story fitting together as tightly as the wooden planks beneath their chairs. And from it characters emerge, distinct and fully human. Tom Chamberlain's nimble leaps from anecdote to anecdote, tangent to tangent, reveal Frank as a flibbertigibbet, his mind forever jumping tracks, from career to career, scheme to scheme, Iranian goats to African bees to Canadian salmon – Molly's blindness ultimately one more project in a never-ending string. As Garry Peters nervously scratches his neck, pats his tie, and rubs his chin, he signals Rice's insecurity and loss; we can feel how far he's tumbled, the desperation and shame reeking from him like whiskey. And as Molly, Peyton Hayslip passes along the gift of sight. What she describes in words, we see. So clear is her delight in recalling Molly's childhood memories of her father, her anxiety over the prospect that, when she can see, she might never know those close to her as intimately as she knows them through voice and smell and touch, that we can picture people we have never seen, places we have never been. Hayslip is center stage in more than the literal sense; her vivid and nuanced performance gives the production its core, its heart.

Occasionally, Peters wallows in Rice's self-loathing, and his broad gestures and aggressive delivery threaten to overwhelm the material much as the unsettling assault of movement and color do Molly. But those moments are the rare departures from Friel and Sneed's simple path. Mostly, this Molly Sweeney is a restrained and elegant parable through which we come to see the beauty in not seeing.