Dreaming Lucia
TurnAround Theatre
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James Joyce’s experiments with stream of consciousness and psychic fragmentation can be seen as reflections of the disorientation of Lucia’s mind; one eminent critic has declared that Finnegans Wake “is [Joyce’s] anguished response to his daughter’s gradual retreat from reality [and] a desperate parody of Lucia’s disastrous compulsion.” Joyce guiltily felt that “whatever spark of gift I possess has been transmitted to Lucia, and has kindled a fire in her brain”; he tried long and hard to minimize her condition as an oddity to be assuaged with a new fur coat or an arranged marriage. His wife Nora ascribed their daughter’s illness to Lucia’s peripatetic upbringing–Joyce shuttled the family from Italy to Switzerland to France rather than return to his native Ireland–as if his self-imposed cultural exile led to Lucia’s psychological one. And the great psychoanalyst Carl Jung went so far as to call Lucia the projection of her father’s unconscious psyche, the “femme inspiratrice” whose illness Joyce could not acknowledge lest it force him to confront the psychosis Jung thought evident in Joyce’s writing. “You are both going to the bottom of the river,” Jung told the author of Ulysses, “but she is falling and you are diving.”
Structured as a flashback, with the middle-aged Lucia recalling her life from her bed in the British mental hospital where she died in 1982, Dreaming Lucia is a series of tableaux–dreamlike, as the title suggests–through which Gregory and Eason attempt to chart Lucia’s development from child to young woman and her deterioration from eccentricity to mental disorder. One stage picture after another impresses with its chilly, alien beauty. The multimedia design by Timothy Morrison (set), Mara Blumenfeld (costumes), David Kersnar (lights), Royd Climenhaga (visual projections), and Bruce W. Holland (sound) suggests the gentility of pre-World War I Europe while conveying Lucia’s increasingly isolated inner world–a lunar landscape as coolly luminous as the milieu described in Joyce’s poem “Simples,” in which he honors his young daughter as a sort of moon maiden. Several episodes use silent gestural language to indicate the intuitive, almost secretive link between Joyce and Lucia, as when the doting but distracted father presents the girl with her first grown-up dress.
Like James Joyce, the protagonist of Brian Friel’s Faith Healer is an Irishman in voluntary exile; but instead of the rarefied environs of Trieste and Zurich, Frank Hardy travels through the peasant villages of Wales and Scotland. Part mountebank and part miracle worker, Frank can sometimes actually cure the lame and the blind; more often they go away unhealed, for Frank has no control over when his talent flows. His magic derives from something deep inside him, barely understood but more demonic than divine. Accompanied by his self-sacrificing wife Grace and promoter Teddy, Frank is the artist as user and used; his self-destruction is as inevitable as its ruinous effect on the people around him.
