If you’re turned off by the fictionalization of historical events, if you were a young artist when you first read James Joyce (and understood Finnegans Wake), and if you consider Samuel Beckett a kind of role model, consider Lucia Mad, Don Nigro’s play about Joyce’s disturbed daughter and her unrequited love of Beckett.

Lucia is her father’s woman-child—myriad-minded, sardonic, simultaneously brooding and full of life, idiosyncratic to the point of neurotic, and never, ever comfortable in her own skin. Despite the literary giants sharing the stage—Joyce, her father, is here, and Beckett too—Lucia Mad is hers. We move through her 20s much as Joyce moves us through the streets of Dublin in Ulysses. Early in that odyssey Lucia encounters Beckett—shy, ill-at-ease, brilliant. What better siren to attract James Joyce’s daughter?

Nigro’s tale suggests that all the intelligence in the world won’t save you from the tension between your unrealizable hopes and the delimited creature you’ll always be. By their natures, James, Samuel and Lucia all must end in failure, and Lucia is left to fantasize herself as a reverse-muse, Beckett’s “agenbite of inwit”—the remorse of conscience, a phrase from her father’s masterwork. He has denied her, and she’ll haunt/inspire Beckett’s lifework.

The Alive Theatre is an itinerant company staging theater 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, the one-time hotel ballroom of the Lafayette. As a stage it’s an unusual combination of depth and intimacy, spaciously accommodating a set that includes 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 athletically—allowing for a theatergoing experience that is a true immersion in story.

All of this might be mere gimmickry if it weren’t for the performances, all outstanding. In the title role, Jill Taylor employs her dancer’s body to display a frenetic energy that mirrors Lucia’s inner turmoil, at once funny and heartbreakingly disturbed. She keeps her “madness” grounded and familiar. But the trickiest roles are Joyce and Beckett (Rory Cowan and Chris Batstone), since almost anyone in attendance will have at least some conception of these celebrated figures—and because Nigro has intentionally written them a bit talky. But Cowan and Batstone own their roles; in the end you accept these characters as flesh-and-blood men and not stand-ins for historical themes. 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 Parisian pimp and a deluded “Napoleon,” getting effective double-duty out of an exaggeratedly poncey 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 from his “Work in Progress” (eventually, Finnegans Wake), the words sound real in his mouth—both sincere and as if he knows whereof he speaks. Nigro grasps his subjects (well, save Jung, who sounds created by someone who’s never read Jung and only seen analysis on primetime 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.

Tags: alive theatre, james joyce, Long Beach, lucia mad, Theater