Yes! Reflections of Molly Bloom, a one-woman play adapted from the "Penelope" episode of James Joyce's Ulysses for stage by Aedín Moloney and Colum McCann

Abstract

Reviewed by: Yes! Reflections of Molly Bloom, a one-woman play adapted from the "Penelope" episode of James Joyce's Ulysses for stageby Aedín Moloney and Colum McCann Richard J. Gerber (bio) YES! REFLECTIONS OF MOLLY BLOOM, a one-woman play adapted from the "Penelope" episode of James Joyce's Ulysses for stageby Aedín Moloney and Colum McCann. World Premiere at the Irish Repertory Theatre, Chelsea, New York, performed 706- 707 2019. It was weeks past Bloomsday 2019 when I finally caught Aedín Moloney's triumphant presentation of YES! Reflections of Molly Bloomat New York's intimate Irish Repertory Theatre. Following her performance, Moloney (who insisted on being called Aedín) participated in an on-stage discussion about Ulyssesand the creation of the play with her co-creator, the novelist Colum McCann. But it was Aedín's YES!that succeeded in making it Mollysday. A seventy-fiveminute abridgment of Molly's soliloquy, YES!uses about a third of Joyce's text selected for this presentation, and all of the shows over the play's month-long run were sold out. YES!opens on a simple set, with all-gray modern curvilinear props—a bed, a mirror, a round hassock. Music, consisting of a single pipe, is heard, courtesy of Paddy Moloney, Aedín's father and a cofounder of the Chieftains, the famous traditional Irish band. Aedín's pale nightshirt-dressing gown is complemented by several colorful scarves, which she uses to full effect throughout this performance. Aedín's Molly brings Joyce's language fully alive, and the performance (though comparisons are unnecessary) is the equal of any of many seen by this reviewer. But what makes this presentation so special is Aedín's extraordinary physical grace and her magnetic facial expressiveness. Barely five feet tall, she seems six or more onstage; when she smiles or laughs, the audience has no choice but to do the same. In this show, a tear is brought to the eye with the beauty of Molly's final lines. YES!is a rollicking roller-coaster of a ride, and only reading Joyce's text directly achieves the same effect. Among many moments, two especially capture the feel of YES!While a brief bare-breasted scene is appropriately revealed, it is when Aedín slowly delivers lines like "[m]akes your lips pale" that her Molly is most sensual. 1Later, lying on the floor as she screams "shit! fuck!," she kicks one foot then another on the wall; it is a powerful bit of staging (see U18.588-89). During the post-performance discussion, Aedín outlined her long engagement with Joyce's novel. She claims to have found a copy of Ulyssesin the Moloneys' Dublin home at the age of ten. While she said that a lot of the sexually related references in the novel went over her head, she was struck by the language and imagery. After she migrated to the United States, McCann asked her to read "Penelope" at the first Ulysses Tavern celebration of Joyce in New York's Financial District in 2002. Credit McCann for the tactful editing [End Page 470]of Molly's soliloquy in YES!and for recognizing Aedín's accent as the perfect vehicle to hear Joyce's text as he himself might have rendered it. Aedín complimented McCann's careful text-editing: "Joyce was having too good a time with it!" Aedín's specific comments on "Penelope," with which she is so familiar, were enlightening. "It can be profoundly lonely being a woman," she said, "but Joyce's passion gives Molly drive and strength. … Joyce meant her to be mother-earth, beautiful, ugly, angry, and so on." Pressed for her favorite line in Molly's soliloquy, Aedín settled on "kissing … his mouth was sweetlike young" ( U18.770-71). She noted that, for the show, "tongue" was edited out of that line (as Joyce had written it), thereby making it all the "sweeter." At another point in the soliloquy, Aedín took out the word "spunk" (see U18.154, 168, 1512); "As a woman, I...