Playwright: Kenneth Robbins
At: Raven Theatre at North Park Village, 5801 N. Pulaski Rd.
Phone: (773) 338-2177; $10
Runs through: Aug. 23
The drama of Molly's Rock is simple and haunting as an Appalachian ballad, as befits a play based in folk-legend: the natural formation of the title exists some 40 miles north of Columbia, South Carolina, with the ghost of a girl who died under mysterious circumstances said to appear thereupon, hailing travelers as was her custom in life. But while many playwrights would encumber this delicate fancy with ham-handed modern metaphors, Kenneth Robbins anchors his speculations in his source material, resulting in a romantic tale that might have been authored by Nathaniel Hawthorne.
Our story opens in 1867, with three men—an embittered Confederate Army veteran, a fervent Baptist minister and a garrulous traveling peddler—converging on Molly's Rock in search of its guardian. Their memories of this icon are soon discovered to be as diverse as their stations: the soldier recalls her as a saint. The clergyman declares her to have been a sinner. But the itinerant merchant insists she was just a young woman curious about the world beyond her childhood home. That she was, in fact, all of these things is gradually revealed to be the precipitator of her untimely death.
The identity of her murderer, on the other hand, is quickly apparent, rooted as it is in 19th-century literary tradition (and, inadvertently, our own prejudices). But the dynamic of Molly's Rock is not that of a whodunit, but the regretful lovers' nostalgia—expressed in a gently poetic idiom likewise fashioned after the epistolary locutions that, centuries later, define its universe—invoked by a complex woman whose only crime, ironically, was a desire to be her own woman.
In another of this season's clever utilizations of environment, the focus of this Raven Theatre production's setting is a large rock on the grounds of the North Park Village apartment complex (although rain on the evening that I attended caused the performance to be moved under cover, a picnic table standing in for the granite citadel). But the intimate actor-audience proximity engendered by such close quarters intensifies the efforts of director Frank Merle's cast, led by Dominica Wasilewska as the passionate Molly, endowing Robbins' undeniably generic yarn with a melancholy sweetness.