At the Site of Seeing / photos by Aimee Lambes
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| l. to r. - Abraham Adams, Natalie Sander Kern, Brian Newberg |
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| Natalie Sander Kern as Molly Sweeney |
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| Abraham Adams as Frank Sweeney |
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| Brian Newberg as Mr. Rice |
By Tom Wachunas
“…they may be ever
seeing but never perceiving, and ever hearing but never understanding,…” - Mark 4:12
"Learning to see
is not like learning a new language. It's like learning language for the first
time." - Denis Diderot
What assumptions do
we make about someone’s well-being or world- view? What perceptions inform
those assumptions? Do they justify our judgments on the circumstances of that
person’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 Brian
Friel gave us a deeply probative and eloquent examination of these
considerations. It’s an utterly intriguing parable, generously laden with humor
and pathos, about the vexing gap between seeing and understanding. The play
visits an ideological crash site at the daunting crossroads of philosophy,
psychology, science, and spirituality - all colliding with life-altering force.
Three fascinating
characters speak to the audience directly through intertwined monologues that
address 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, now
driven out of seclusion by his whiskey-soaked obsession to restore Molly’s
sight.
There’s something
exquisitely appropriate about Craig Joseph’s choice of venue for this
production – the 50-seat Dietz Theater in Akron’s Weathervane Playhouse. The
performance space itself could be taken as a metaphor for how sighted people
might assume that for a blind person, living must indeed be a sad condition - boxed
in, it would seem, by blackness. The intimate darkness of the room gives way to
an uncanny if not ironic effect of magnifying and illuminating even the
smallest of emotive gestures and facial expressions articulated by the actors
who are, in a word, astonishing.
A thrilling element
throughout 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 when
considering that the Irish-born character of Mr. Rice spent years forging a
career while living in America (before his marriage fell apart), thus becoming
more Yankee-ized, as the character of Frank so eagerly reminds us at several points.
Through a large
portion of the play comprised of flashbacks on the characters’ lives, Natalie
Sander Kern renders the character of Molly with a palpably luminous countenance.
Kern makes Molly Sweeney an effervescent embodiment of charisma, a positively
contagious presence, and anything but morose – that is, at least until the
cathartic eye operation. Her consistently riveting gaze isn’t the vacant look
of someone groping about the world tentatively (she doesn’t use a cane), but
rather someone whose eyes sparkle with the shimmer of pure, wonderful
apprehension. In one of the play’s richest passages, she speaks of a favorite
life 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 eager
for that world of pure sensation, of sensation alone—sensation that could not
be enhanced by sight—experience that existed only by touch and feel; and moving
swiftly and rhythmically through that enfolding world; and the sense of such
assurance, such concordance with it.” Molly doesn’t see her blindness, so
to speak, as a tragic abnormality to be pitied or remedied.
Equally captivating
and intense are the performances by Abraham Adams and Brian Newberg in their
roles of Frank and Mr. Rice, respectively. Adams is a dizzying amalgam of boyish bravado,
self-doubt, tenderness, mournful frustration, and righteous anger as he recalls
his big-hearted but quixotic career pursuits. They include his hilarious story
about making cheese from Iranian goats afflicted with chronic jetlag. And
though all his support for the successful outcome of Molly’s surgery is
genuinely 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 quite
effectively draws us into the angst-riddled disaster that his life had become,
and the desperate hope to restore his internationally acclaimed reputation by
performing a miracle on Molly.
Molly’s partially
restored vision initially leaves her in a short-lived period of giddy hope. But
amid Frank and Mr. Rice’s incessant pressures to educate her in correctly
connecting to what she can see, it
dawns on Molly, and us, that to the men in her life, she’s become an agenda, a
project, not a person. No miracle at all, the cure has forced her out of the
ecstatic sensory completeness she once knew, becoming instead an infection that
progressively thrusts her into a state of heartbreaking withdrawal and
confusion.
This work of truly great
theatre may well leave you longing for the same assurance and concordance with
the 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, Sunday
November 18 at 2 PM / produced and presented by Seat of the Pants Productions
and presented through special arrangement with Dramatists Play Service, Inc. / tickets
$20 - available ONLINE at
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