By Cynthia Citron
NORTH HOLLYWOOD — “Shakespeare was God, and so was my father,” Lucia Joyce says. Then she adds, by way of explanation, “God comes down to earth and forgets who He is.”
Lucia (Meg Wallace), the passionate, obsessive daughter of James Joyce is eventually consumed by her desperate hunger for his attention. He (Ian Patrick Williams), for his part, loves her, too, but only when he is not working on his latest masterpiece, Finnegan’s Wake, which for 17 years was a “work in progress.” As, she says, was she.
The Joyces’ turbulent household in Paris, one of myriad households during their peripatetic life, is the setting for Don Nigro’s dramatic biographical play, Lucia Mad. These Paris years chronicle Lucia’s abandoned career in dance, her abandonment by various lovers, and her descent into madness. And, perhaps, the hint of an incestuous relationship with her doting father? Who can say, since all of their emotional correspondence over the years was destroyed by Joyce’s family members after his death.
The core of the play, however, deals with Lucia’s compulsive pursuit of her father’s literary assistant, Samuel Beckett (Robert Ross). Ross looks startlingly like the young Beckett, but he plays him as practically catatonic in his avoidance of human connection. He retreats from Lucia’s fervid advances and lapses into moody silences, even though some other sources suggest that he actually was one of her lovers. (As was sculptor Alexander Calder.) In this production Beckett is portrayed as so passive, however, that one may be excused for thinking he might be gay, even though he is known to have had both a wife and a mistress during the last three decades of his life.
Lucia considers Beckett “the love of her life,” but Beckett is honest in telling her that though he admires and respects her, he doesn’t love her. What he doesn’t tell her is that he is alarmed by the signs of her oncoming madness.
His own view of the world, if not insane, is certainly pessimistic. “Life is short and rather smelly,” he says, and “all we can control is our own mental vacuum.” He also displays a droll sense of humor: when asked by Joyce “How do you find Dublin?” he responds, “I go up to London and turn left.” As for his native land, he says, “I only miss Ireland when I’m there.” And he describes his parents dismissively by saying, “My mother kept donkeys and my father sat in a chair all day and farted.”
Lucia, who describes herself as “an ocean of loneliness,” was seen and diagnosed by multiple doctors, including Carl Jung, before she was institutionalized at the insistence of her mother, Nora (Pamela Daly). “When I’ve driven 100 doctors insane,” Lucia declares, “I’m going to retire and go into real estate.”
By that time Lucia had thrown a chair at her mother and set her own room on fire. And when Joyce’s book, Ulysses, which had been banned in America for many years was finally released, and congratulations were pouring in from all over the world, Lucia, jealous of the attention being paid to her father, cut the telephone wires in their home.
Surprisingly, Joyce displayed little animosity toward the Americans who had banned Ulysses for obscenity. “The ones in charge are stupid,” he says. “The rest are only ignorant.”
“Lucia Mad” is intelligently written and artfully directed by Steve Jarrad, but after all the narcissistic sturm und drang the play ends with a whimper, not a bang. Lucia, institutionalized when she was 28, spent the rest of her life, some 47 years, in a series of institutions. And here the play falls apart. Meg Wallace, who does an admirable job up to this point, lapses into melancholy and despair and delivers her last scene in a hushed and dreary monotone that is unheard and mumblingly unintelligible only three feet away. Instead of engendering sympathy, she leaves us irritated with her presentation and wondering what she has to say for herself after so many years of madness. Or, as she was alternatively diagnosed, as schizophrenic, hebephrenic (a subtype of schizophrenia), cyclothymic (similar to manic depression), or “not lunatic, but markedly neurotic.” We’ve got medicine for all that now. And a wider range of roles that women can aspire to. Unfortunately, Lucia Joyce was born too soon.
Lucia Mad will continue at the Sherry Theatre, 11052 Magnolia Blvd. in North Hollywood Fridays and Saturdays at 8 and Sundays at 5 through November 14th. Call (323) 860-6569 for tickets.
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Citron is Los Angeles bureau chief for San Diego Jewish World