Molly Sweeney

By CHARLES ISHERWOOD

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(Mark Taper Forum; 760 seats; $ 37 top) Mark Taper Forum presents a play in two acts by Brian Friel. Directed by Gwen Arner.
 
Cast: Jane Fleiss (Molly), Colin Lane (Frank), Alan Scarfe (Mr. Rice). Ideas of home are at the heart of playwright Brian Friel's work. His characters can't get away from it, or can't get away from it fast enough or both. For the title character in his newest play, "Molly Sweeney," home has a larger meaning than the town of Ballybeg in County Donegal, the mythical Irish anywhere that the playwright has peopled with his plays for more than 30 years. For Molly, virtually blind since birth, home isn't a geographic place but the world she's built for herself with the touch of her delicate hands, her acute sense of smell. When an operation restores her sight, homesickness becomes more than a nostalgic longing; it becomes an illness that almost destroys her. Molly (Jane Fleiss) has found more than a measure of happiness in her sightless world in her 41 years; indeed, she believes her joy in the act of swimming, for instance, "could not have been enhanced by sight," so full of sensation is the experience for her.
 

But when she meets and marries Frank (Colin Lane), a restless man with a boisterous passion for improving the world, himself and others, she's caught up in his desire to restore her vision. The wise Molly well knows that part of Frank's attraction to her is her possibilities as a new "project" after the failed goat farming, the whale welfare program but she can't resist his enthusiasm. In Mr. Rice (Alan Scarfe), Frank finds Molly's best hope. A down-at-the-heels doctor hounded by the despair of a failed marriage and faltering career into the backwater of Ballybeg, Rice warily undertakes to operate on Molly, and gradually grows passionate himself, dreaming that success will restore his integrity and happiness. What does Molly have to lose? is the question all three ask themselves, answering with varying degrees of honesty and insight; but only Molly really knows, and she is seduced by the imagined vision of what she may have to gain. Friel is probably incapable of creating an uninteresting character; he gives these three people layers of histories and hopes that add resonance to the larger ideas the play explores, about the connections between seeing and knowing, the psychological and sensual links by which we tether ourselves to reality, or create our own. And yet for all its depth and eloquence, "Molly Sweeney" remains a play more easily admired than enjoyed. It's structured, much like Friel's "Faith Healer," as three interweaving monologues addressed to the audience; the characters never interact with each other, and all are speaking in retrospect of events past. To be sure, this design is linked to the play's meaning: Each character is in a sense locked in his own world, driven to ultimately tragic effect only by his own vision of events. But it robs the characters of a certain depth; people on stage seem more real when they're not talking only to us, reminding us that we're in a theater, not observing life. And the need to dramatize events imposes a certain rigor, an economy, that eludes Friel here. For all their eloquence, these characters go on a bit; no one on stage interrupts a reverie with a cup of tea, a contradiction. It's a pity, too, because Friel is a master at revealing characters through their interaction; think of all that is delineated in the clipped, empty exchanges between Gar and his father in "Philadelphia, Here I Come!" In its three principals the Mark Taper Forum and director Gwen Arner have a more than adequate cast. Scarfe finds all the sad nuances in Rice, his professorial demeanor barely masking desperation. Lane's Frank might be a little less antic, though he provides much of the play's humor. As Molly, Fleiss has the richest and toughest role. She gives a nice worldly-wise spunk to Molly in the first act , but remains perhaps too spirited, too youthful, in the second act, when, with her sight partially restored, Molly paradoxically begins to lose her bearings. (To be fair, Molly's behavior in act two seems to be dictated too much by the real-life cases from the Oliver Sacks files that Friel was inspired by, not the character herself.) Paulie Jenkins' complex lighting, playing across Kate Edmunds' bare set, is crucial to a story about seeing, though it probably wasn't wise to attempt to approximate for the audience the experience of Molly's first blurred visions. In any case, the colorful light palette adds some needed texture to the play. Perhaps because its characters are on their own, alone with their memories, "Molly Sweeney" lacks the melancholy human warmth of Friel's best plays; there is something austere in its structure that may be impossible to overcome. Charles Isherwood

Set, Kate Edmunds; costumes, Susan Hilferty; lighting, Paulie Jenkins; sound, Michael Roth, Jon Gottlieb; music supervised and arranged by Roth; casting, Stanley Soble; production stage manager, Mary K Klinger; stage manager, David S. Franklin. Opened Nov. 14; reviewed Nov. 13; runs through Dec. 22. Running time: 2 hours, 30 min.