Molly Sweeney
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Molly Sweeney is a two-act play by Brian Friel. It tells the story of its title character, Molly, a woman blind since infancy who undergoes an operation to try to restore her sight. Like Friel's Faith Healer, the play tells Molly's story through monologues by three characters: Molly, her husband Frank, and her surgeon, Mr. Rice.
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It enjoyed considerable success on the stage, but attracted little critical interest, perhaps because of its superficial similarities to Faith Healer (1979), another play composed of a series of monologues delivered on an empty stage by characters who have no interaction. This play is about a blind woman in Ballybeg who constructed for herself an independent life rich in friendships and sensual fulfillment, and her ill-fated encounter with two men who destroy it and cause her madness: Frank, the man she marries who becomes convinced that she can only be complete when her vision is restored, and Mr. Rice, a once-renowned eye surgeon who uses Molly to restore his career. In a note in the programme of the 1996 Broadway production, Friel says that the story was inspired in part by Oliver Sacks's essay "To See and Not See".[1]