"Molly Sweeney' at Amaryllis (2nd review)

Blindness as metaphor: What Brian Friel could learn from Kant, Plato and St. Paul

JIM RUTTER

A case like Molly Sweeney offers the kind of story that the fertile imaginations of playwrights rarely dream up themselves: a title character, blind for 40 years, is suddenly offered a miraculous opportunity to regain her sight. Amaryllis Theatre’s production presents a stellar cast whose near-mesmerizing performances never falter under Tom Reing’s powerful direction. But sadly, Brian Friel’s play reduces this extraordinary story to the level of the commonplace while failing to render an accurate depiction of the motivations involved.

Friel’s play is based on neurologist Oliver Sacks’s New Yorker essay “To See and Not See.” Its title character has been blind since the age of ten months, with thick cataracts blocking the still-functioning retinal cells of her eyes. She meets Frank, a foot soldier in the world-saving army of his likely Irish hero Bono, who sees in her one more human in need of rescue, and plunges into a library’s worth of research into her condition. In the course of his studies, Frank discovers Dr. Rice, a local specialist and once-prominent ocular surgeon, whose shattered marriage contributed to the alcoholism that ruined his career long ago.

By the end of Act I, Molly’s left eye has been operated upon; mid-way through Act II, Dr. Rice removes the cataracts from the right eye. But unlike the repentant convert St. Paul on the Road to Damascus, she regains only some visual sensation, and the world does not magically reappear for her as fully sighted people perceive it.

A very rare case

Molly’s problem lies in a rare physiological condition called visual agnosia: The organs for receiving visual sensation (the eyes) function as they should, but the visual cortex in the brain has not learned to (or cannot) process this information into meaningful concepts. Because of the surgery, Molly no longer suffers from physical blindness; but she’s still blind mentally, and now she must learn to make sense of what she sees. As Kant— the one philosopher central to the debate that Friel fails to mention— points out in his solution to the arguments of Locke, Hume and Berkeley (all of whom Friel’s play discusses), and which cognitive psychology has long since confirmed, one’s mind must build up a comprehensible representation of the world from the sense data.

Indeed, visual agnosia is only slightly less rare than a case like Molly Sweeney’s, of which, Sacks tells us, there have been no more than 20 over the last thousand years (and visual agnosia more often results from brain damage than from the manner in which Sweeney acquires it). Molly isn’t someone who simply lacks knowledge she must now patiently acquire, but a person who might possibly lack the very cognitive faculty that makes acquiring knowledge possible— a maddening condition which reduces her to a non-functioning asylum inmate by the play’s end.

But instead of fully incorporating this rare condition into his plot, Friel reduces Molly’s struggles to the common fear experienced by every kindergarten student who resists leaving home for his first day of school. Molly fears the surgery, fears the newness of her semi-restored sense, and resists the arduous visual training of learning to see simply because she longs for and misses the comfortableness of the familiarity and established routine of her non-seeing world. Hence, the extraordinary becomes commonplace, engendering an advantage in comprehension, but a loss for dramatic (or any other kind of) truth.

Telling instead of showing

Even though Friel only introduces the concept of agnosia late in the play, most of the problem stems from his writing style. He uses three interwoven monologues to relate the entirety of the story. None of the characters interact, and they rise in animation from their chairs only about half of the time. As such, the play cannot possibly convey the horror this woman would have experienced.

No longer in her familiar world of blindness, her eyes now receive a constant bombardment of visual stimuli that make no sense, resulting in a perpetual circus “funhouse” (minus the fun). But in a play that consists only of monologues, we don’t see Molly struggling to make sense of a world—we merely hear about it.

Moreover, while Friel engages in lengthy explanations of psychology and philosophy, he fails to exploit the one philosophical thought experiment that could have illuminated the struggle that eventually drives Molly insane— namely Plato’s allegory of the cave.

Plato’s passage in The Republic offers a similar scenario: Prisoners chained inside a cave can only see the shadows of objects projected onto a wall in front of them. But once freed, a prisoner could walk out of the cave, and with direct sunlight finally see the actual objects, giving him true knowledge but nearly blinding him in the process until he learns to see things as they truly are.

The Amaryllis agenda

Moreover, while Molly’s true condition serves as a cautionary tale, against extreme changes for which one might never be fully equipped, Friel’s play (and Molly’s case) don’t suit the various uses to which Amaryllis Theatre Company would like to use this story.

Amaryllis planned to accompany two of the performances with a symposium entitled, “Does Disability Need a Cure?” Certainly, a case like Molly Sweeney’s provides a stronger answer than the controversy provoked by members of the deaf community who claim that the use of cochlear implants is tantamount to a form of genocide (although, realistically, a case like Molly’s might better answer the question, “Can disability even be cured?”). However, Friel’s play offers little material that might help answer the symposium’s question one way or the other.

Both Frank and Dr. Rice push Molly into surgery from motives unique to their characters: Dr. Rice wants to redeem his once-successful career as a pioneer in ocular surgery, while Frank sees Molly the same way Greenpeace sees whales. Neither character’s motives reflect the motives of activists who support or oppose “fixing the handicapped.”

The real (and more interesting) question that Friel’s play fails to address is: “Why the urge to bring the differently abled into the fold?”

The Apostle Paul was blinded for only three days when he fell from his horse on the Road to Damascus, but the foxhole he fell into proved sufficiently horrifying to transform him entirely. He promptly dedicated himself to bringing the rest of the world “into the fold”— that is, he assumed his experience applied to everyone else. Had Friel focused on this type of motivating fear, his play (and Amaryllis’s use of it) could have achieved far greater dramatic power. Molly’s pedestrian longing for a “comfortable” world pales by comparison.



To read another review by Armen Pandola, click here.