Blind actress adds depth to "Molly Sweeney" role

From The Tennessean in Nashville:

For all of Tasha O'Brien's 20-odd years, there really was no hope of her sight being restored. Born 2½ months early with a condition called optic nerve hypoplasia, she had "very limited" vision in her left eye and none at all in her right.

But then the news came: Stem cell research was showing some success in fixing the problem. Unanswered questions began to surface. Would she? Could she? Did she even want to?

"Up to that point, I had never even thought about it," she said. "And you do get this response, this 'Why wouldn't you?' I know that it would change my world, and it might make it better. But it might not. I have a system, and it's worked for me. It might look scattered to others, but it works. And that would be a whole new life, a whole new situation to adapt to."

O'Brien, a local actress, (pictured) is not alone in the quandary. Such is the battle of the main character in Brian Friel's Molly Sweeney, which People's Branch Theatre opens this week. The play follows a blind woman talked into an operation to restore her sight, as told from her perspective, her husband's and her doctor's.

O'Brien takes on the role of Sweeney for the piece, playing "a very independent character . . . who ends up trusting her husband's judgment more than her own."

"The piece is really difficult for me personally to get through," O'Brien says. "It brings up a lot of real questions. We all have this idea that the way we see things is the way they really are, but the script raises the question if that is the truth. I may see things one way, but is the person sitting next to me seeing the same thing?"

People's Branch Theatre artistic director Ross Brooks says casting O'Brien in the part was more than just gimmick; the two first worked together in a Nashville Children's Theatre production of The Witch of Blackbird Pond, and he knew that she'd bring skill and an "honest perspective."

People's Branch is not the first to cast a blind person in the role, "but it's not something that happens a lot," he says.

Added benefits, according to O'Brien, are what she considers her "emotional availability" — her willingness to be fully in the moment "and not be conscious about what I look like onstage."

Brooks says O'Brien also has a highly developed sense of the others around her, fully aware of changes in emotion and even people's breathing.

People's Branch also plans to take the play to the Tennessee School for the Blind for a Feb. 9 performance and open-to-the-public panel discussion, touching on the integration of blind and visually impaired students into society, surgeries that restore sight and ethical issues involved in the work.

"I hope that people can take away that our ways of thinking, our particular ideas and concepts, and the structure that we live by, those are not the only way," O'Brien says. "Hopefully, people will look at this woman's story and see the bigger picture, what it represents.

"For myself, portraying Molly, I don't want to always portray a blind woman. . . . But I want this piece . . . to set me apart from other people and give me a chance to show my talent, to acknowledge that yes, I have a handicap, but I'm not willing to let it come first. There's more to me than that."