[NEohioPAL] REVIEW: Molly Sweeney at Akron's Weathervane Playhouse

[Tom Wachunas]

At the Site of Seeing

By Tom Wachunas

“…they may be everseeing but never perceiving, and ever hearing but never understanding,…”  - Mark 4:12

"Learning to seeis not like learning a new language. It's like learning language for the firsttime."  - Denis Diderot 

   What assumptions dowe make about someone’s well-being or world- view? What perceptions informthose assumptions? Do they justify our judgments on the circumstances of thatperson’s life? How do those judgements motivate our actions toward that person?Living, and loving, can be complicated, mysterious, and hurtful. 

   With his 1994 play,Molly Sweeney, Irish playwright BrianFriel gave us a deeply probative and eloquent examination of theseconsiderations. It’s an utterly intriguing parable, generously laden with humorand pathos, about the vexing gap between seeing and understanding. The playvisits an ideological crash site at the daunting crossroads of philosophy,psychology, science, and spirituality - all colliding with life-altering force.

   Three fascinatingcharacters speak to the audience directly through intertwined monologues thataddress their divergent perspectives on the same story. Here’s the tale,directed by Craig Joseph, of 41 year-old Molly Sweeney (Natalie Sander Kern),blind since early infancy; her well-meaning dreamer of a husband, Frank(Abraham Adams); and Mr. Rice (Brian Newberg), a once famous opthamologist, nowdriven out of seclusion by his whiskey-soaked obsession to restore Molly’ssight.

   There’s somethingexquisitely appropriate about Craig Joseph’s choice of venue for thisproduction – the 50-seat Dietz Theater in Akron’s Weathervane Playhouse. Theperformance space itself could be taken as a metaphor for how sighted peoplemight assume that for a blind person, living must indeed be a sad condition - boxedin, it would seem, by blackness. The intimate darkness of the room gives way toan uncanny if not ironic effect of magnifying and illuminating even thesmallest of emotive gestures and facial expressions articulated by the actorswho are, in a word, astonishing. 

   A thrilling elementthroughout the evening, thanks to dialect coach Chuck Richie, is the actors’command of their enchanting Irish accents, particularly from Kern and Adams.It’s much less present in Newberg’s speech, though still authentic whenconsidering that the Irish-born character of Mr. Rice spent years forging acareer while living in America (before his marriage fell apart), thus becomingmore Yankee-ized, as Frank so eagerly reminds us at several points.

   Through a largeportion of the play comprised of flashbacks on the characters’ lives, NatalieSander Kern renders the character of Molly with a palpably luminous countenance.Kern makes Molly Sweeney an effervescent embodiment of charisma, a positivelycontagious presence, and anything but morose – that is, at least until thecathartic eye operation. Her consistently riveting gaze isn’t the vacant lookof someone groping about the world tentatively (she doesn’t use a cane), butrather someone whose eyes sparkle with the shimmer of pure, wonderfulapprehension. In one of the play’s richest passages, she speaks of a favoritelife activity – being immersed in the sea, swimming. Her voice bubbles with joy,tinged with sorrow for sighted folk, when she recalls, “…Just offering yourself to the experience—every pore open and eagerfor that world of pure sensation, of sensation alone—sensation that could notbe enhanced by sight—experience that existed only by touch and feel; and movingswiftly and rhythmically through that enfolding world; and the sense of suchassurance, such concordance with it.” Molly doesn’t see her blindness, soto speak, as a tragic abnormality to be pitied or remedied. 

   Equally captivatingand intense are the performances by Abraham Adams and Brian Newberg in theirroles of Frank and Mr. Rice, respectively.  Adams is a dizzying amalgam of boyish bravado,self-doubt, tenderness, mournful frustration, and righteous anger as he recallshis big-hearted but quixotic career pursuits. They include his hilarious storyabout making cheese from Iranian goats afflicted with chronic jetlag. Andthough all his support for the successful outcome of Molly’s surgery isgenuinely ebullient, he doesn’t much like Mr. Rice.

   No wonder, perhaps.Maybe he sees too much of his own flawed motivations in the alcoholic doctor.In that role, Brian Newberg gives us a punctilious philosopher who quiteeffectively draws us into the angst-riddled disaster that his life had become,and the desperate hope to restore his internationally acclaimed reputation byperforming a miracle on Molly. 

   Molly’s partiallyrestored vision initially leaves her in a short-lived period of giddy hope. Butamid Frank and Mr. Rice’s incessant pressures to educate her in correctlyconnecting to what she can see, itdawns on Molly, and us, that to the men in her life, she’s become an agenda, aproject, not a person. No miracle at all, the cure has forced her out of theecstatic sensory completeness she once knew, becoming instead an infection thatprogressively thrusts her into a state of heartbreaking withdrawal andconfusion. 

   This work of greattheatre may well leave you longing for the same assurance and concordance withthe experience of being alive that Molly savored when swimming. In the end,more than a little heartbroken yourself, you’ll simply want to hug her.

   Molly Sweeney, in The Dietz Theater at Weathervane Playhouse, 1301 Weathervane Lane,Akron, Ohio / Friday, November 16 & Saturday November, 17 at 8 PM, SundayNovember 18 at 2 PM / produced and presented by Seat of the Pants Productionsand presented through special arrangement with Dramatists Play Service, Inc. / tickets$20 - available ONLINE at  https://mollysweeney.eventbrite.com

www.seatofthepants.org

   For othercommentaries by Tom Wachunas on local performing and visual arts, please visithis blog, ARTWACH, at www.artwach.blogspot.com
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