Also this issue: Curtain Call The world of stage and screen hits the canvas at PAFA. -Susan Hagen Poetry Commotion -Ainé Ardron-Doley Visitors from Other Worlds -Helen Thompson Going, Going ! -Juliet Fletcher Media Frenzy -David Anthony Fox War Is Hell -Toby Zinman Trouble in Camelot -David Anthony Fox

April 17-23, 2003

theater

Novel Concept

by David Anthony Fox

Real life can’t have been much of a cabaret for Lucia Joyce: The daughter of James Joyce spent most of her adult years isolated in a mental hospital in England. Yet Pig Iron’s new concept piece fashions the institutionalized Lucia as a slip-wearing, Elizabeth Wurtzel-style disaffected hellion, as well as a rock entrepreneuse. Turning St. Andrew’s hospital in Northampton into a kind of British Fillmore, Lucia emcees and (with the assistance of other patients) sings and acts out a cycle of songs based on her experiences.

The Lucia Joyce Cabaret displays many of the familiar Pig Iron virtues. There's marvelous visual éclat in every detail, from scenic designer Hiroshi Iwasaki's sagging Eiffel tower to Emily Stork's haunting lighting. The company really knows how to do site-specific theater, and under Dan Rothenberg's direction, the grim Christ Church Annex feels remarkably alive. The entire cast displays a sense of utter confidence. It's all very, very cool.

In the end, though, the piece itself is both derivative and pretentious. Press materials on the The Lucia Joyce Cabaret acknowledge debts to Marat/Sade and Hedwig and the Angry Inch, and the new show consistently blurs the fine line between homage and rip-off.

Both Marat and Hedwig are, in their different ways, perfectly cohesive. This Cabaret is all over the map.

We're barraged with names dropped from Lucia's past. In addition to her famous father, the show bandies about her former lovers, Samuel Beckett and Alexander Calder -- also Charlie Chaplin, and Irish patriot and Yeats' inamorata, Maude Gonne. It's very artsy-literary.

But there's no depth here at all, nor even any information you couldn't get in a 10-minute Google search. The Lucia Joyce Cabaret often feels like an undergraduate term paper set to music (that rock score, by the way, is pretty good by garage-band standards). Or worse -- maybe the show is just an excuse for a bunch of know-it-all theater kids to jam about their current idée fixe.

Among the ensemble cast, Cassandra Friend and (especially) Jane Moore are splendid, Emanuelle Delpech and Quinn Bauriedel merely weird and annoying, and everybody else somewhere in between.

It's time, I think, to demand more than superficial cleverness from the gifted Pig Iron people. What remains to be seen is if their exceptional performance and visual skills can be matched by some creative maturity.

James Joyce Is Dead and So Is Paris: The Lucia Joyce Cabaret

Through April 26, Pig Iron Theatre Company at Christ Church Annex, Second and Church sts., 215-627-1883.