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| Actors Meg Wallace, Pamela Daly, Robert Ross and Ian Patrick Williams in Lucia Mad. |
By Ed Rampell
One of the great things about mediums such as novels, film and theater is that they can serve as sort of time machines, bringing certain far away places, long ago times and historical personages back to life for us to meet. And so it is with Don Nigro’s Lucia Mad. For me, the best thing about this play is that it dramatizes fascinating real life notables. Among them: Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Gustav Jung (Kenn Schmidt), Irish playwright Samuel Beckett (Robert Ross), Irish novelist James Joyce (Ian Patrick Williams) and the least famous of the lot -- but nevertheless this work’s titular character -- Joyce’s daughter, Lucia (Meg Wallace).
Other theatergoers may find the drama’s exploration of insanity to be the most compelling thing about Nigro’s play, which Steve Jarrad – who ably directs the taut Collaborative Artists Ensemble cast – assured me is fact-based, and not a work of whimsy.
The author of 1922’s Ulysses embarked on epic odysseys of his own; I remember seeing a statue of James Joyce sitting at a table in the Café Ulysses in Pula, a Croatian seaside town with superb Roman ruins -- including the world’s sixth largest still standing ancient Roman amphitheatre -- where the Irishman taught English circa 1905. (Not in the arena – at a language school, possibly a Berlitz, primarily for Austro-Hungarian Naval officers in those halcyon days before Archduke Ferdinand was assassinated.) The expatriate writer’s Homeric peregrinations also took the exiled Dubliner to Trieste, Zurich and Paris, where much of Lucia Mad is set. There, Lucia meets Beckett, an acolyte of her father’s whom she falls madly if unwisely in love with.
Alas, poor Yorrick, this uninvited love goes unrequited, and Beckett spurns her advances and requests for a “thumping” humping, et al. I think Ross quite captures Beckett, who he depicts as an extremely distant, alienated individual (with an enlarged prostate the size of “an eggplant,” we are told) incapable of expressing love. Ross is spot on: this is precisely how I’d imagine the author of Waiting for Godot, that landmark 1953 Theatre of the Absurd work about impotence, to be.
Depending on your point of view, Wallace delivers a harrowing, bravura portrayal of Lucia, as she descends into madness. Or one may find watching her angsty performance as gratingly disturbing as fingernails scratching chalkboards. Instead of the portrait of the artist as a young woman, Wallace’s Lucia has all the sensitivity, troubles and the like often associated with artists, but none of their gifts to express and render them in tangible form. So, Lucia has the worst of both worlds, if you see what I mean. While her brilliant father invented literature’s stream of consciousness, Lucia suffers from scream of unconsciousness, externalizing her troubled interior monologues. (What’s that old cliché about the fine line between genius and insanity?) Lucia also suffers from a lack of, shall we say, free associations with members of the opposite sex.
Compounding matters is a two and a half hour script (including a 10-minute intermission) that is repetitive and could be cut by 30 minutes or so. (Nigro is reportedly a prolific playwright of James Joyce-like dimensions, who has written 200-plus plays – if you can believe it.) Fortunately, this intense production presented at L.A.’s NoHo Arts District is leavened with a wry wit and Joycean word play.
Schmidt plays, well, the archetypal analyst as C.G. Jung, who treats -- or rather tries to -- the troubled Lucia when, I suppose, the Joyces are living in exile in Switzerland. But this emotionally searing drama reminded me more of R.D. Laing’s The Politics of Experience, with its emphasis on the psyche’s inner odyssey of insanity, than it did of the Jungian fascination with symbolism and the collective unconscious.
Alas, Lucia’s Molly does not bloom, and she is doomed. But what makes and drives her mad? In the end, I couldn’t quite figure out what was bugging poor Lucia or what sent her to the bughouse. Pamela Daly is a sympathetic mother as Nora Joyce (supposedly the real life prototype for Molly Bloom). Williams’ Joyce may be a bit aloof, but he’s jovial enough and a concerned parent, if somewhat (but not excessively) prone to imbibing, as well as obsessively intent upon scribbling the Great Irish Novel. He doesn’t seem to be molesting and abusing his poor misbegotten daughter. Maybe it was this footloose author of Ulysses’ endless odysseys that sent his daughter off the deep end? Or was it genetics? In any case, Lucia is a woman with a screw loose who doesn’t screw loosely -- aye, there’s the nub of the rub. Finnegan may wake, but poor Lucia, alas, never does.
Lucia Mad is being performed through Nov. 21 at the Sherry Theatre, 11052 Magnolia Blvd., North Hollywood, CA 91601 on: Fridays and Saturdays at 8:00 p.m.; and Sundays at 5:00 p.m. For more info: 322/860-6569; www.Plays411.com/luciamad
