Keating, John (Theater Director)

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    Review: For ‘Molly Sweeney,’ Not Seeing Was Never the Obstacle

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    The Irish Rep ends its season-long Brian Friel survey with the story of a blind woman who undergoes an operation to try to restore her sight.Molly Sweeney can identify dozens of plants by touch, catch a lie in a familiar voice and dance ecstatically through a crowd without disturbing a hair. Because she lost much of her eyesight when she was 10 months old — except, crucially, her ability to discern light from dark — Molly has developed keen powers of sensory perception.Sure-footed though she is, the title character in “Molly Sweeney,” now running at the Irish Repertory Theater, is treated like a pawn by two men who can’t see beyond their own self-interests. That’s one of several conspicuous paradoxes explored in Brian Friel’s 1994 confessional drama, the final installment of the theater’s season devoted to the playwright’s work.Like Friel’s more often revived “Faith Healer,” “Molly Sweeney” is told through a series of monologues addressed to the audience. All three characters, who remain onstage throughout, narrate their subjective recollections of a six-month span (the year is unspecified; the setting is Ballybeg, Friel’s fictional Irish hamlet). But only one of them can speak with unbiased clarity on the central occurrence: what happened when a doctor tried to restore Molly’s sight.Friel’s extraordinary hand with vivid prose is especially evident in Molly’s version of events. Played with a poised sense of wonder by Sarah Street, Molly recalls relishing in the beautiful details of a world she had no need of seeing. The idea for an eye operation came from her husband Frank, played by John Keating with the frazzled intensity of a mad scientist. A dilettante prone to colorful tangents, he sees Molly as an object of fascination and a personal cause. Molly’s egocentric ophthalmologist, Mr. Rice (Rufus Collins), considers her a potential miracle patient who might revive his career.Directed by Charlotte Moore, this production is faithful to the author’s stated preference for minimal staging (the program quotes Friel’s disinterest in “concept or interpretation”). That puts the focus squarely on the three actors, who do fine work illuminating Friel’s descriptive language, particularly Street and Keating as spouses who gravely misjudge each other. The performers are confined to their thirds of the stage, sparse but for a chair and window each (the set is by Charlie Corcoran), while mottled blue-and-violet lighting (by Michael Gottlieb) creates an impression of a developing field of vision.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Review: The Melancholy of Misspent Lives in ‘Autumn Royal’

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      The Irish Repertory Theater returns to live performances with a domestic tragicomedy by Kevin Barry.Above the narrow little room where May and Timothy sit plotting, their father lies abed, his wits gone haywire. Sometimes, from below, they hear him speak the first and only line of the poem he’s been composing for months: “A duck walk across a puddle.”In just those six words, the bird exhibits more agency than May and Tim have shown for years, maybe ever. Well into adulthood, they remain trapped in the same house in Cork, Ireland, where they’ve spent their whole lives — caring for their father and passing cruelly amusing judgment on the neighbors.“The Coynes all had the big, beefy faces,” May says, gazing out the window as one of them walks by. Then comes the withering, tossed-off insult: “Whatever they did wrong in a past life.”Even so, an ingrained dread of what the neighbors might think has kept her and Tim in line, ministering to the man upstairs — May taking on the dirty work, like sponge baths, that Tim claims to be too delicate for.But in Kevin Barry’s domestic tragicomedy, “Autumn Royal,” the first live performance at the Irish Repertory Theater since the start of the pandemic, the time for rebellion has come. Because as unwell as their father might seem, his lab results point to years, maybe decades, more of life.“What are we goin’ to do, May?” asks Tim, who nurses a detailed fantasy of escaping to Australia, where he will surf daily, find a little blond wife and have two children with her named Jason and Mary-Lou.If you’re familiar with Barry’s fiction, like his grim and gorgeous novel “Night Boat to Tangier,” you know that the moral brokenness of his often wildly hilarious characters can take extravagantly violent turns. May (a very funny Maeve Higgins) and Tim (John Keating, ditto) certainly are tempted, in the interest of securing their own freedom.Once they summon their courage, though, the gravest infraction they can commit starts with leafing through the yellow pages, in search of a nursing home. The place they choose is the Autumn Royal — where, Tim says, his guilt slipping out, “There’s only two to a cell.” But ridding themselves of their father isn’t as easy as shipping him off.Ciaran O’Reilly’s production, on Charlie Corcoran’s suitably claustrophobic set, is wonderfully agile with Barry’s comedy but never finds its footing with the intimations of trauma threaded through the script. A revelation near the end doesn’t land with the emotional heft it needs, and neither does the play.In the more surreal moments of painful memory, busy projections (by Dan Scully) crowd the walls, demanding attention, when a less embellished design approach — a change of lighting, say — would have kept the focus on Barry’s language, which is already heavy with atmosphere. Similarly, the sound design (by Ryan Rumery and Hidenori Nakajo) muddies when it means to clarify.This production succeeds mainly on the level of a caper, albeit one spiked with melancholy about squandered lives. Reminiscing about how beautiful their long-split parents once were, Tim laments to his sister, “They could have had magnificent children.”“We’re never going to get past ourselves here, Tim,” May says.Weighed down by duty, stalled by inertia, maybe she’s right.Autumn RoyalThrough Nov. 21 at the Irish Repertory Theater, Manhattan; irishrep.org. Running time: 1 hour 10 minutes. More