Aedin Moloney as Molly Bloom questions her lot in life.
James Joyce’s Ulysses is a brilliant but dense and sometimes inaccessible work. Aedin Moloney’s solo performance in Yes! Reflections of Molly Bloom is adapted from Molly's “Yes!” soliloquy at the end of Joyce’s novel. Co-created by Moloney and acclaimed Irish author Colum McCann, the show is a remarkably ambitious collaboration, a welcome contribution to understanding the complexities of Molly Bloom (wife of Ulysses’ protagonist Leopold “Poldy” Bloom), and a consummate one-woman show.
“Moloney conveys emotions not only through her words but in her nonverbal expression and the grace of her movements.”
In bringing Molly’s character to life, Moloney and McCann have fleshed out the portrait of a thoroughly human, caring, and flawed woman in midlife whose youth held the promise of deep, requited love. Instead, her decades-long pattern of giving of herself to Poldy and other lovers has left her embittered and longing for the deeply satisfying love and appreciation by men that she received as a young woman.
“I wish somebody would write me a love letter,” Molly says. “True or no, it fills up your whole day and life. Always something to think about and see it all around you like a new world.”
Molly’s almost exclusively retro romanticism stems from her birth in Gibraltar as the daughter of a Spanish woman and an Irish officer stationed there. It encompasses vivid memories of toreadors, courtships by young admirers, and music, which Moloney and McCann have integrated into the script. The simple, haunting melodies she sings, and those played on woodwind and tin-whistles, are those of Moloney’s late father, Paddy Moloney, a Celtic music visionary who founded The Chieftains. Sparsely and strategically inserted, these tunes magnify the impact of Molly’s reminiscences of Gibraltar and heighten their contrast with her unhappy and largely unfulfilled life in Dublin.
Aedin Moloney as Molly Bloom. Photographs by Carol Rosegg.
It’s unlikely that William Congreve’s pithy, centuries-old appraisal of a woman’s anger and resentment at being rejected— “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned”—is generalizable to all women. Yet in Molly’s case, it’s an appropriate reflection of negative recollections that have barraged her and an apt assessment of her states of mind. Applied to Molly, Congreve’s statement is even more salient when Moloney transitions from fury to nostalgia to incredulity, with stops at grief, anger, passion, jealousy and more.
Moloney adroitly switches these emotional states on and off in a 90-minute monologue (with no intermission). These plausible transitions include her anguish and frustration as a mother who has lost a newborn son and is distanced from Milly, her teen daughter who is studying away from home. Moloney conveys emotions not only through her words but in her nonverbal expression and the grace of her movements, with ballet-style extensions of her limbs.
Director John Keating has capitalized on that physical gift to convey Molly’s longing and barely harnessed sensual core. He has focused Moloney’s versatility and emotional range to draw on the audience’s empathy when Molly, sobbing against a wall, pours out her anguish about her dead son.
Perhaps the strongest thread that unites this emotional roller coaster is Molly’s sexual desire. In broader terms, this longing represents her need to be valued and appreciated by her husband and in general by men who have entered and left her life. There have rarely, if ever, been reciprocal relationships, neither from her current lover, Boylan, nor from Poldy.
Set designer Charlie Corcoran has provided an open space where Molly rails against her men and the women with whom her husband has cheated. When she vents her rage at his infidelity and near-abandonment of her, and at men in general, or she fantasizes about the life she had in Gibraltar, she does so within an almost iridescent environment that is free of furniture except for a platform with a raised head that suggests a bed and pillow.
Moloney sweeps across the space, clad only in her off-white nightgown and green-gray sheet/scarf, which contrast sharply with a soothing and unified bluish floor, walls, and ceiling. Although she purports to be powerless, Molly strikes the stark image of a self-possessed woman. Corcoran’s design supports that, offering understated color and overall simplicity that enable Molly’s range of movement and the freedom to express her emotions through the actress’s powerful physical presence. No matter one’s perspective on Molly Bloom’s wrenching pain, Moloney’s performance is masterful.
Yes! Reflections of Molly Bloom runs through July 17 at the Irish Repertory Theater (132 W. 22nd St.). Evening performances are at 7 p.m. Thursdays and at 8 p.m. Wednesday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday; matinees are at 3 p.m. on Wednesday, Saturday, and Sunday. For more information, contact the box office at (212) 727-2737 or visit irishrep.org.
