`MOLLY SWEENEY' SHINES THROUGH ITS BLEND OF EMPATHY, POIGNANCY.

Byline: Reed Johnson Daily News Staff Writer

Seeing, we're often told, is believing. But in his visionary drama ``Molly Sweeney,'' playwright Brian Friel suggests that what we believe, or need to believe, indelibly colors what we see, or imagine we see.

In the Mark Taper Forum's beautifully acted new production, the visual metaphors in this 2-year-old tragedy are as tightly woven as a Celtic knot.

So, too, is the emotional logic that gradually enfolds Molly, a radiant young woman, blind since childhood; her impulsive husband, Frank, a kind of do-it-yourself intellectual; and the middle-age physician Mr. Rice, who dreams of resurrecting his own darkened reputation by restoring Molly's sight.

Ostensibly set in the provincial Irish present, the production unfolds on Kate Edmunds' spare platform design, a vertical scrim to the rear. Seamless and essentially timeless, it could as easily be taking place in 1930 as 1990.

And though its final moments lack a certain clarity, director Gwen Arner's production largely succeeds in illuminating Friel's subtlest half-tones.

Told as a three-way, past-tense, hypnotically lyrical monologue, ``Molly Sweeney'' is many things at once. Most accessibly, it's a painful, unexpectedly comic love triangle, pitting Frank (Colin Lane) against Mr. Rice (Alan Scarfe) for control over Molly's insatiable spirit and, ultimately, her destiny.

It's also a metaphysical tussle between the forces of science and rationalism - chiefly personified by Mr. Rice - and the intuitive, profoundly irrational cravings of human nature. Those cravings find their richest expression in Jane Fleiss' Molly, in a performance so full of rapturous intensity that the actress's face seems suffused with an inner light.

If Molly is the play's fulcrum, the two men are the levers driving it.

Differences of class, temperament and intellect make Scarfe's wonderfully droll, disdainful Rice the antithesis of Frank, a cheerful failure whose half-baked self-improvement schemes have led him into earnest ponderings of Lockean philosophy and into a spectacular business disaster involving imported Iranian goats. Lane enters his character on such a high note that you wonder how he'll possibly sustain it. Memorably, he does.

What unites the two men, and to a lesser extent Molly, is the capacity for delusion. Just as Mr. Rice projects his thwarted ambitions onto his trusting patient, so Frank craves spiritual enlightenment through his wife. Cleverly, Arner stages the tug-of-war as if the men were lawyers stalking a witness.

But Fleiss' Molly is no man's cipher. Fiery, independent and without a hint of resignation, it's her vivid, voracious spirit that calls into question the abstract, imagined worlds of the people around her, and that finally lends ``Molly Sweeney'' its terrible empathy and poignancy.

Those qualities might reverberate still more if the final monologue were staged with more calculated ambivalence than apparent uncertainty. Has Molly transcended her condition or retreated into denial? Arner seems doubtful.

No matter. Like a furious jig accented by a weeping fiddle, ``Molly Sweeney'' is a folk hymn to a miraculous but unredeemed world - a world, as Molly says, ``of wonder and surprise and delight.''

THE FACTS

What: ``Molly Sweeney.''

Where: Music Center's Mark Taper Forum, 135 N. Grand Ave., Los Angeles.

When: 8 p.m. Tuesday through Friday; 2:30 and 8 p.m. Saturday; 2:30 and 7:30 p.m. Sunday; through Dec. 22.

Tickets: $29 to $37; call [phone].

Our rating: Four Stars.