"Sensitive, nuanced, delicately paced, luminous."

Aug. 12, 2006 performance reviewed by Frances Benn Hall.

Brian Friel’s Molly Sweeney now running through Sept. 3rd at The Workshop Playhouse in Great Barrington, is one of his most stunning plays, and the current production under John Trainor’s direction, gives it the poignant and dedicated attention it deserves.

All three members of the tightly knit cast fit seamlessly into their roles and give performances that are finely etched, nuanced and unforgettable Ireland is there in hints of dialect—cadence and vowels, and in Friel’s rapturous poetry, but the theme is wider, embracing the concept of the difference between seeing and understanding.

The plot centers around Molly (Diedre Bollinger) a forty-one year old woman, blind since early babyhood, but who has learned to cope, not just valiantly but contentedly, with her blindness. Her father has taught her to “see” tactically.

But her husband Frank (Douglas MacDonald) who delights in “projects” (such as cheese making in Ireland with Iranian goats) researches blindness and is sure Molly can be made to see.

He takes her to Mr. Rice ( Kevin Wixson) an eye doctor who was once internationally famous, but who , for personal grief, has sunk to whiskey-sodden obscurity in a small hospital in Donegal. Rice sees Molly’s case as “The chance of a lifetime,” and though he has doubts, consoles himself by thinking, “What has she got to lose?”

Each man thus, almost unwittingly, has an agenda for urging Molly into an operation for which she feels no need, indeed would never herself choose.

The situation and the characters are set up in the first act. The second act concerns what the coming together of these three brings about. Growing directly out of the personalities of the three we have in the first act come to know so well, the outcome moves the viewer to tears. These three are playing with fire, each with different motivation; all three must come to understand that “seeing is not understanding”.

This reviewer has deliberately refrained from narrating further plot. The events unfold gradually as layer after layer is peeled back by the interlocking monologues of the three characters, each in his designated stage space, each revealing pieces of the story, as it was before the operation and then after it. And being Friel, interwoven with metaphor as well.

All three characters are well-cast and give compelling performances.

< Central is Bollinger in one of the finest performances of her career. She inhabits the role, and we see the trusting child touching a flower and sensing its color, see her dancing wildly at the party the night before the operation (yet physically she does not dance). This is a virtuoso performance. Sensitive, nuanced, delicately paced, luminous.

She is ably supported by MacDonald and Wixsom in performances that bring alive their very different characters and motivations. Although the play has a very real victim, it has no villains, only these two, bringing with them their own personalities and agendas that can bring disaster.

The staging, as requested by Friel is simple. Three actors, on stage at all times, each in his own space. Although there is much dialog, it is not directed from one to another, but interwoven in the intricate monologs as the play unwinds. The stage at Workshop Playhouse proves especially well- designed for the spacing and lighting of the three characters, isolating but still uniting them. A single item such as a red coat on hall-tree can speak volumes.

Molly Sweeney is one of Friel’s finest plays. First produced at the Gate Theatre in Dublin in 1994 with Friel directing, it has remained high in the Friel canon. These actors know and appreciate the fact in a production well worth seeing.