The perfect Medicine for Joycean obscurity
Enthusiasts of Finnegans Wake hold that James Joyce’s mythically inaccessible novel was meant to be read aloud, a notion that holds up under Medicine Show Theatre’s recent staging of the work. The production’s vibrant visual metaphors brought a sense of narrative thrust to the Middle Mongolian in which Wake seems to have been written. Actual narrative clarity surfaced only occasionally from the mix, but its flashes of beauty were frequent, and the comic vitality with which the superb cast infused the production almost never waned. This may have been one of those rare adaptations whereby the genius of non-dramatic source material is more fully realized onstage.
Harold Bloom has suggested that Joyce was afflicted with Shakespeare envy, and that his works reflect an agonistic awareness of how his own genius dims beside that which produced Hamlet and King Lear. This may explain Joyce’s impatience with English or any other intelligible language in the composition of Finnegans Wake. Believing the expressive majesty of his mother tongue to have been exhausted by the Bard, Joyce perhaps sought—as does many a theatrical avant-gardist—to transcend existing language altogether. If Joyce succeeded, he did so at the expense of Shakespeare’s universality. The task of the reader in taking on Wake is to bring a knowledge of various languages and the whole of world history to decode the pseudo-English patois of its author.
Director Barbara Vann thankfully focused in her program notes on the millenium-old, tumultuous relationship between England and Ireland, which provided invaluable context for following (if not fully comprehending) her theatrical vision of the work. A wheelbarrow’s load of books dumped in a pile established England’s assault on the Irish language, and the nesting and laying motions of actress Sarah Engelke amid the books suggested the hatching of calamities which proceeded to unfold. Embodying the Irish people as Finnegan, actor Bill Corry toppled Humpty-Dumpty-like from a bar and, yelping with comic, wide-eyed perplexity, was subjected to a round of choreographed abuse by the cast. Barbara Vann herself appeared affectingly as an abandoned wife, and in a beautifully crafted monologue reminiscent of the biblical Lamentations, evoked Ireland as a country ravished by foreign power of its might and cultural splendor, then left to wither by her broken inhabitants.
Harnessing the undeniable energy of Joyce’s language, these images brought a unifying overlay to Wake’s plotlessness. A continually southward sense of decline does not a dramatic arc make, but that is not Medicine Show’s fault. That the production was intermittently funny and moving is a genuine achievement and speaks to the inspired chutzpah that has led this company through three decades of staging stubbornly challenging material. And how encouraging to see that Off-Off Broadway has not completely reverted to kitchen-sink plays about suburban pathologies.