'James Joyce's The Dead'
By Hedy Weiss
The Chicago Sun-Times
December 2, 2002

Like many holiday parties, it begins slowly and tentatively--with the apprehensive hosts welcoming the nervous, fluttery guests who arrive in awkward procession, and who begin to fill the air with an ever-escalating sense of suppressed excitement and giddily anxious self-consciousness.

On this particular winter's night--the evening of Julia and Kate Morkan's annual fete in Dublin, a ritual of 30 years standing that James Joyce celebrated in his short story "The Dead"--there is the added thrill and melancholy of a great snowfall that promises to blanket all of Ireland. And it is into this dreamy but very real world--fueled by high spirits (including those of the alcoholic variety), glorious song and deep affection--that we are led in "James Joyce's The Dead," the little beauty of a musical by playwright Richard Nelson and composer Shaun Davey that debuted in New York in 1999 and is now receiving its Chicago premiere at Court Theatre.

Long after the show's 98 seamless minutes have ended, you remain suspended in its afterglow--warmed and chilled at the same time, and surprised by the way its emotional undertow has overtaken you. This is a tribute to Joyce, of course, whose masterful tale suggests the precariously thin membrane that can lie between love and distraction, joy and disappointment, life and death. It is a testament as well to the delicacy with which the musical's makers have adapted Joyce's masterful tale for the stage. And it is a tribute to Charles Newell's fluid, sensitive direction--which bears a distinctly Gaelic accent, but more than a touch of Chekhov, too--and to his cast of 13 actors and five onstage musicians (led by the impeccable musical director Jeff Lewis, in topcoat at the piano) who have embraced this story of the fragility of existence with their hearts embroidered on their sleeves.

The story is seen, in filmy retrospect, through the eyes of Gabriel Conroy (John Reeger), a local academic and Joyce's alter-ego. He observes the action from a writer's perspective--standing just outside the events as narrator, even as his relationship with his wife, Gretta (Paula Scrofano), becomes a crucial element in his recollection of the evening.

It is Jan. 6, 1904, and "the three graces"--Gabriel's aging spinster aunts Julia (Deanna Dunagan), a retired church choir singer, and her equally musical sister, Kate (Kathy Taylor, all warmth and sisterly support), along with their niece, Mary Jane, also a singer and teacher (played by the luminous, silvery-voiced beauty, McKinley Carter)--are the center of all attention. Their guests are a cross-section of the cultural gentility of the city, with a few genuine eccentrics tossed in for good measure.

They include the freely tippling music promoter, Mr. Browne (a wonderfully bumptious Neil Friedman); Gabriel's university colleague and a spirited Irish nationalist and feminist, Molly Ivors (Hollis Resnik in fiery, step-dancing form); the gently neurotic opera tenor Bartell D'Arcy (Stephen Wallem, crucial in one of the show's loveliest scenes); the young, clownish, decidedly drunk family friend Freddy Malins (Christopher Cordon, delightfully awkward and full of life); his high Victorian, fiercely Catholic mother (fine work by Sarah Minton); Mary Jane's student, Rita (the golden-voiced Cristen Paige, who also plays Julia's youthful self in one of the show's most moving scenes); another student, Michael, nearly paralyzed with performance anxiety (Rob Hancock), and the Morkans' sprightly little maid, Lily (Ana Sferruzza).

It is the looming demise of Julia--played brilliantly by Dunagan, an actress of such subtlety and tremulous emotion that you almost fear for her safety--that shadows the story. But before she fades, she has a burst of great mischief, leading a chain of dancers in "Naughty Girls," one of the show's more unforgettable moments. When she is put to bed--a vision in snowy white nightgown and winding sheet--she is serenaded by Mr. D'Arcy with an aria of exquisite beauty from a forgotten Italian opera.

If Dunagan very nearly steals the show--as she should--it is the parallel interaction of the Conroys that frames it. Reeger, who even resembles Joyce physically, artfully suggests a man whose heart is forever Irish but whose mind is fiercely internationalist--and a man whose world quietly shatters when he suddenly realizes his wife (Scrofano, who beautifully morphs from maternal figure to radiant girl) still aches for a long dead lover from her youth in Galway.

Set designer Brian Bembridge's spare, V-shaped space, Linda Roethke's muted, jewel-toned costumes and Joel Moritz's superb, poetic lighting, combined with Mark Howard's spontaneous-feeling choreography to conjure the intimate, festive mood with a winning minimalism. If the production has a flaw, it's that at moments the quest for intimacy can lead to spots of inaudibility.

"The world, I've come to think, is like the surface of a frozen lake," says Gabriel. "We walk along, we slip, we try to keep our balance and not to fall. One day there's a crack, and so we learn that underneath us is an unimaginable depth."

In "James Joyce's The Dead," we experience the darkest depths, but we also see the blinding light.