Lucia Mad
Written by Don Nigro
Directed by Craig Flemming
Written by Don Nigro
Directed by Craig Flemming
"'Lucia Mad' Alive Theatre, Long Beach, California"
By James Scarborough
GRUNION GAZETTE
By James Scarborough
GRUNION GAZETTE
Throughout the wonderful production of Don Nigro's Lucia Mad, directed by Craig Fleming for The Alive Theatre, in the Executive Ballroom of The Lafayette Hotel, Lucia Joyce (Jill Taylor), the rambunctious, to say the least (throw in brilliant, insatiable, charismatic, too), daughter of celebrated 20th century author James Joyce (Rory Cowan), wears a dress (nice choice Miranda Carnessale) that billows and flounces as she moves.
She moves and flounces with maenad frenzy because she, Lucia, was trained and had performed with renown as a dancer (I have to think Taylor was and has, too). Taylor captures the character to a tee: elegant, aerobic, not a little violent, often tender, but always rapturous and poetic.
It's easy to get wrapped up in Lucia's movement in that cavernous space, which features lit candles on the floor that establish the boundary of the stage. It's a brilliant set design concept (bravo Danielle Dauphinee and Craig Fleming) because, while the floor candles set the physical limits of the stage, Lucia is a character without boundaries, a nice synonym for madness.
She gloms on to the Irish playwright Samuel Beckett (weedy, tweedy, hardly needy Chris Batstone) who decamps in the Joyce household to pay homage (general factotum, personal secretary) to the Irish bard. She falls for him big time. I can't imagine a better pairing, the vivacious Taylor and the taciturn Batstone, she full of life, he full of, well, nihilism. He doesn't return her lavish advances, which animates her all the more. More adorable fits of pique you'll never see. At least until it's clear he's really not all that into her.
She's like Icarus who soars towards the sun and then plunges to earth.
It's an intelligent script (the syntax of the title reminds me of "Girl, interrupted"). The pairing of her life and her father's work-in-progress, which came to be known as Finnegan's Wake, was inspired. Finnegan's Wake is stream of consciousness, without beginning or end, illogical for the most part, but lyrical as hell. Ditto for her. She's pure intuition, pure feeling, no beginning, no end, going nowhere, going everywhere. But while her father and her faux-beau had literary outlets, she had nothing but unrequited love.
Memorable moments abound. When she points out to her mother (Danielle Dauphinee) that she was losing her mind Lucia points to her father reciting gibberish (a part of the text of Finnegan's Wake). With excruciating coyness she suggests, in a thoroughly modern Millie manner, that she and Beckett engage in s-e-x-u-a-l i-n-t-e-r-c-o-u-r-s-e (you have to hear Taylor's pronunciation of the phrase to garner it's full impact).
The peripatetic Alive Theatre finds these sites (bandshells, riverboats, hotel ballrooms) and animates them, alive and kicking. They create the same anticipation that Apple creates just before a new product release. They make us wonder, what will they do next?
Performances are 8pm, Fri. & Sat, 4pm, Sun, June 22. The show runs until June 29.
Tickets are $15-18. The show is located in the Executive Ballroom of The Hotel Lafayette,
528 E. Broadway. For more information call 818-7364 or visit www.alivetheatre.org.
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"Lucia Mad Review"
By Steven Leigh Morris
LA WEEKLY
GO LUCIA MAD hangs on Jill Taylor's haunting portrayal of Lucia Joyce— James Joyce's daughter, who, in Don Nigro's 1993 play, slips into madness largely from her unrequited, bald passion for her father's secretary, young Samuel Beckett (Chris Batstone). Craig Flemming's staging, nicely marbled with touches of surrealism, has no Irish accent in earshot — which expands Nigro's theme of love and lovelessness from the very specific characters, self-exiled in Paris, to a place far beyond the literary circuit. Joyce's wife, Nora (Danielle Dauphinee), seethes with brittle contempt for Mr. Beckett, and the manner in which he breaks Lucia's heart. If there is no love, as Beckett insists (while engaged in a tortuous search for the perfect phrases to express the realities of life and impending death), then how can one go insane from longing — as Lucia does in this play? Batstone's Beckett comes off as an earnest, sensitive fellow who just can't stomach Lucia's brazen advances and has to weedle out of a very funny ploy she concocts to get him to propose to her. Beckett is above love, and Lucia so beneath it, it crushes her. Staged in an old hotel ballroom, Batstone's production employs scattershot lighting across multiple locales, often from actors switching desk lamps on and off in unison. This also creates looming shadows splayed across the walls, which is perfectly in keeping with the themes of longing and ghostly presences. Rory Cowan's James Joyce is too young to embody the authority of the literary master. The madness in Taylor's blazing redhead Lucia seems at first to be a flamboyant affect, until it becomes apparent how that very affect could well be one of her many manipulations. When she actually goes mad, her performance settles into an intense stoicism that gets to the very break of heartbreak.By Steven Leigh Morris
LA WEEKLY
Hotel Lafayette, Executive Ballroom, 528 E. Broadway Ave., Long Beach;
Fri.-Sat., 8 p.m. (added perf Sun., June 22, 4 p.m.);
www.alivetheatre.org. An Alive Theatre production. (Steven Leigh Morris)
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"Once Upon a Time and a Very Good Play It Was"
By Greggory Moore
THE DISTRICT WEEKLY
By Greggory Moore
THE DISTRICT WEEKLY
If you are turned off by fictional reweavings of true events, and if on top of that you cut your literary teeth on James Joyce and consider Samuel Beckett a personal hero, aside from running the risk of being accused of pretentious snob, you might attend a fledging theatre group's production of Lucia Mad with trepidation. But if it's Alive Theatre's version of this Don Nigro play about Joyce's disturbed daughter and her unrequited love for Beckett, fear not!
Alive Theatre is an itinerant company making its bones staging off-center theatre in unique spaces. Last time it was a cabaret on Duke's Riverboat Restaurant in Rainbow Harbor. Now they're exploiting that great space locals know as "the Dome Room" (i.e., the one-time hotel ballroom of the Lafayette) not so much for its acoustic properties but for the opportunity it provides to create a "stage" that is an unusual combination of height, depth, breadth, and intimacy, spaciously accommodating a multifaceted set containing the Joyce home, a Paris café, the later Beckett's den, a hospital, a courtroom, and an asylum. Director Craig Fleming has blocked the production so that his actors are often in motion—sometimes quite athletically—allowing for a theatergoing experience that is a true immersion in the story. Another triumph is the lighting, a combination of backstage-controlled overheads and functional parts of the set manipulated by the actors. The result keeps the play interesting to look at, the hues and shadows always casting just the right mood.
All of this, though, might be reduced to gimmickry or style over substance if it weren't for the performances, all of which are outstanding. In the title role, Jill Taylor employs her dancer's body
to display a freneticism that mirror's Lucia's inner turmoil, at once comely and funny and heartbreakingly disturbed. She keeps her "madness" grounded and somewhat familiar—the kind of thing most of us can relate to, at least a little bit—instead of playing a "crazy" type. But in some sense the trickiest roles are Joyce and Beckett (Rory Cowan and Chris Batstone, respectively), since almost anyone in attendance will have at least some conception (whether accurate or not) of who these celebrated figures "really" were—and because Nigro has intentionally written them a bit too talky to be true-to-life. But Cowan and Batstone own their roles, and so in the end you accept these characters as flesh-and-blood men and not stand-ins for history. Danielle Dauphinee (wife/mother Nora Joyce) and Ryan McClary (a double-role as Thomas McGreevey and Carl Jung) do exactly what the script calls for them to do, having their moments while letting the larger characters do the heavy lifting. And Aaron Von Geem is a scene-stealer both as a Paris pimp and a deluded "Napoleon," getting effective double-duty out of an exaggeratedly poncy French accent.
It all comes together because these people know their play. In real life Joyce is the most ridiculous brilliant writer in history, and Nigro isn't the first to have fun at his expense (Tom Stoppard zings him in Travesties); yet, in a hilarious scene where Cowan's Joyce sententiously dictates some silly tripe of his "Work in Progress" (eventually, Finnegans Wake), he sounds both sincere and like he knows whereof he speaks. Nigro grasps his subjects (well, save Jung, who sounds created by someone who's both never read Jung and only seen analysis on TV), and Fleming sees what Nigro intends, imparting this understanding to his actors so that they know who they are. We've all been to bad Shakespeare, where it's clear everyone onstage is just mouthing the words and wearing silly costumes; nothing like that is afoot here. Go to Lucia Mad, yes I say yes you should Yes.
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"Intellectualizing with mad 'Lucia'"
By David C. Nichols
LA TIMES
Literary history swarms with accounts of fragile psyches undone by love, and "Lucia Mad" undoes with the best of them. Don Nigro's ornate fantasia about James Joyce's daughter and her unrequited yen for Samuel Beckett is nothing if not faithful to the existentialist underpinnings of its real-life figures. In its valiant Alive Theatre staging in Long Beach, the audience sits in L-formation around a playing area framed by candles floating in bowls of water. Director Craig Fleming opens with a note of disarming lunacy, as a knock on the outside doors admits Lucia (the vivid Jill Taylor), who cranks up the gramophone and lip-syncs in cracked Dennis Potter fashion. This recurring motif, like the various others that Nigro deploys in his stream-of-consciousness scenario, works because of Taylor's restlessly controlled title portrayal. As lithe as a Denishawn dancer, Taylor's sudden silences and piquant timing nicely offset lighting designer Chris Batstone's deadpan Beckett. Rory Cowan makes an enjoyable Joyce, clipped and authoritative, and though Danielle Dauphinee feels faintly anachronistic as long-suffering wife Nora, her dry sarcasm fits the absurdist vaudeville ethos. Ryan McClary and Aaron Van Geem are broad but serviceable in dual supporting roles. Whether their agreeable fervor and Fleming's direction will translate to general audiences is a trickier paradox. There is skillful pastiche in Nigro's script and sly symbolic juxtaposition, but also a raft of references that may tickle devotees of "Ulysses" and "Waiting for Godot" while baffling the uninitiated. Although "Lucia Mad" announces a company well worth watching, the net effect is highly specialized, most recommendable to scholars and cognoscenti.By David C. Nichols
LA TIMES
-- David C. Nichols
"Lucia Mad," Hotel Lafayette, Executive Ballroom, 528 E. Broadway Ave., Long Beach.
8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays; 4 p.m. this Sunday only. $18. Running time: 2 hours, 10 minutes.
