5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
It will change the way you look at things forever, February 7, 2000
This review is from: Molly Sweeney (Paperback)
I Just finished this play and loved it. In fact, I found it so moving and powerfull that I was anable to close my eyes because of the haunting ramifications described in this play. I had no choice but to write this review at 2:30 AM. This play tells the story of a women who undergoes a surgery in order to regain her sight, and the aftermath of that surgery. It is told in a seris of monologues by the three central characters in the show to brilliant perfection. Read this play, it will change the way you look at the world forever
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Three powerful soliloquies add up to one fascinating drama., October 22, 2004
Brian Friel, Ireland's premier modern dramatist, produces a minimalist ensemble drama in this 1995 play, presenting a story of immense dramatic power with no dramatic action on stage at all. Molly Sweeney, a forty-year-old woman who lost her sight when she was a baby, is the central character, the two others being her husband Frank, and Mr. Rice, a man whose surgical skill can return partial sight to her. When the play opens, all three characters inhabit their own spaces on stage, and each tells his/her story directly to the audience, the characters having no interaction with each other at all.
In a brilliant example of dramatic irony, the play comes fully to life through their stories and achieves a poignant reality though the audience never actually sees any action. In this way, the play's structure parallels the life of Molly, a woman who sees nothing but fully experiences the joy of life. Molly is fully independent, works as a massage therapist in a local health club, and, in fact, supports her husband, who is unemployed, considering her life completely "normal." When she has the opportunity to regain partial sight, she accepts the surgery at the behest of her husband and the surgeon, a man so dependent on alcohol that he sees the surgery as his last chance to restart his career.
Through the story of the surgery and how it changes the lives of the three characters, Friel forces the audience to consider important aspects of reality and how we interpret it. As he points out during the play, a functioning person without sight has created "engrams" of reality based on the other senses and must be taught how to connect new visual knowledge with the tactile engrams of his/her life if s/he is to be successful in understanding a sighted world. The gaining of sight involves the loss of the blind person's known world and the creation of a world in which everything is constantly moving and changing, "all the consolations of...the familiar" gone forever. Friel brilliantly recreates the drama of all three main characters as they try to cope emotionally with the changes wrought by Molly's surgery.
Ultimately, the play raises complex questions about fantasy vs. fact, and imagination vs. reality and suggests that these concepts may not be the opposites that many of us think them. The unusual format of the play itself is perfectly suited to this subject matter, asking us to imagine each character's invisible, but nevertheless completely real, inner life. Mary Whipple
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
SOMETIMES A GIFT DOESN'T WORK, February 24, 2009
Molly Sweeney is a play adapted from the narrative of neuroscientist Oliver Sacks.
In an exceptional string of books, Sacks has brought us a series of compelling stories about various kinds of neurological catastrophe. A painter loses all perception of colors. The world appears to him in obscene shades of gray-white. He can, as a result, no longer paint or even embrace his wife because she appears loathsome to him. Patients suffer pains, or itches, from limbs that were amputated long ago. A miracle drug reverses the comas of patients suffering from meningitis, restoring them to full vitality. But the medication loses effectiveness. They retreat into permanent sleep again. (The story was made into the movie Awakenings, with Robert DeNiro and Robin Williams.) A man retains his ability to reason but loses any capacity to distinguish between the objects in front of him: a hat and a person are identical to him. (This story, "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat," was made into an opera, performed in San Francisco ten years ago.)
The logic of the marriage between Sacks, a scientist (though also a humanist) and Brian Friel, Ireland's greatest living playwright, is not apparent at first sight. But it's a marriage made in heaven. Because ... both of them write about the same thing, which is loss and isolation.
There is a blind woman. Her name is Molly. Molly Sweeney. She's forty-one years old. For more than forty years, she has survived, even thrived, as a woman without sight. She has a job -she's a massage therapist in a local spa--and a husband -she's two years married. But she doesn't see, beyond shadows and vague movement at the periphery of her vision.
There is her husband. His name is Frank. Frank's a dreamer, but not one whose projects you want to invest in. His enthusiasms are short-lived and ill conceived: he imports Iranian goats into the blustery winter of County Mayo and the sheep end up living six months out of twelve inside his house to avoid the cold and never yield milk at all. He's excited about importing African killer bees and shepherding a convoy through Ethiopia. One of his enthusiasms is restoring his wife, Molly's, sight. Whether she wants it or not.
There is a doctor. His name is Rice. Patrick Rice. He was once a bright light, a "meteor" in his chosen profession of eye surgeon. Then his wife ran away with his closest friend and he found solace in a bottle. Now he's a second-rate hack in a provincial hospital in Donegal. Molly is his passport back to respectability. If he can restore her sight ....
Frank pushes, Rice pulls, Molly acquiesces without knowing what she's getting herself into. The operation works. Her sight is restored, not perfect but more than she's ever known.
And her world falls apart. Molly knew how to negotiate her old world of tactile evidence. She'd mastered it, was comfortable and fluent in it. Now she must relearn the world -her husband Frank, a relentless but inept autodidact says, she must learn "new engrams." All her old knowledge and competence is shut away from her; the new world is a blooming confusion, to paraphrase William James. It's not only confusing, it's ugly. Learning to maneuver in the world of the sighted after forty years blind is hard work. Molly moves from being a highly competent human being who didn't perceive her handicap as a liability to one who can't compete in the sighted world because she is forty years behind the curve.
From there on, it's downhill in this poignant, thoughtful, reflective and even occasionally funny play about the human cost of change -in Molly's case, the loss of competence and exile from her past memory. Brian Friel is a master wordsmith who has never written about a more serious theme than the one in Molly Sweeney.
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