ReaderRecommended: 'A blind woman regains some sight, but loses her world in Molly Sweeney.' | kerryreid
Inspired in part by Oliver Sacks’s 1995, shares Sacks’s ability to translate the medical into the metaphysical. It’s also a natural successor to Friel’s 1979The healer inis an alcoholic opthamologist, Paddy Rice—once a rising star in the field, but now divorced and in exile in Ballybeg, the fictional town in Donegal that serves as the setting for many of Friel’s plays.
It’s not Molly’s blindness that’s the problem; it’s that the men around her cannot see her as much more than a problem to be solved. Even her beloved father, who gave her a love of flowers by helping her “see” the garden behind their house, failed her by trying to keep her to himself, molding her in his ideals. Rice says of Molly before the surgery, “What has she got to lose?” As it turns out, almost everything.
Kruse’s Molly is the sympathetic heart of the show, as Friel intended. But as the three come closer and closer to understanding what has happened to Molly , a sense of clamminess, aching loss, and regret pervades the story, with flashes of sharp-elbowed wit and poetry threaded throughout. Kauzlaric lays bare the self-loathing that seems to seep out of Rice’s pores right along with the booze, while Isler’s Frank looks even more little-boy-lost at the end than at the beginning.
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