“In high school, Stephen Dedalus was my Holden Caulfield,” says Lookingglass Theatre cofounder Joy Gregory, explaining why she wrote Dreaming Lucia, a play about James Joyce’s troubled daughter. “I wanted to be just like Stephen Dedalus: this suffering, tortured, melodramatic, melancholy, little, tweedy, Irish poet boy.
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The only daughter of one of the great writers of the 20th century, Lucia Joyce early on showed an artistic bent of her own. She danced, painted, and did a little writing. “Some theorize that the broken-down language of Finnegans Wake was an attempt to mirror Lucia’s highly individual style of writing,” Gregory says. But Lucia’s artistic yearnings were unfulfilled, and she died alone and mad, having spent most of her adult life in an insane asylum in Northampton, England.
“There was a great deal of secrecy in Joyce’s family about Lucia,” Gregory says. Always close to his daughter, Joyce was nevertheless ashamed of Lucia’s mental illness and deeply worried by her eccentric behavior. She was sexually promiscuous yet was never able to establish a steady relationship. She was a pyromaniac and set fire to an aunt’s house. She was once observed at dawn trying to capture goldfish in a pond with a safety pin.
Gregory has a simpler, sadder synopsis: “Its the story of a woman who loses against silence.”
