James Joyce And His True Love

By Gwen Orel

There's no doubt that James Joyce (1882 to 1941) is one of Ireland's most celebrated authors. He's on mugs and t-shirts; his books have pubs named for them. Ulysses on Stone Street is one of the best places in the city to hear music and have a pint, particularly on Bloomsday, which is June 16, the day that the events in Joyce's novel Ulysses take place.

But his works are innovative and a little intimidating.

In the musical Himself and Nora, playwright/composer Jonathan Brielle puts the great man in a great love story. With the assistance of director Michael Bush and a talented cast, Brielle says, the production offers a window into Joyce's world.

The production is presented by American Theater Group, and runs at Hamilton Stage, 360 Hamilton Street, Rahway, New Jersey, through May 12. Visit americantheatergroup.org for tickets.

MUSIC IN THE LANGUAGE

A lot has been written about Joyce and Nora, the chambermaid he married, wrote pornographic letters to, and immortalized in Ulysses as Molly Bloom.

The reason to turn the couple's story into a stage musical, Brielle said, is that "Everything about Joyce's writing is lyrical. Aside from the fact that he was an Irish tenor who sang with John McCormick, every time I sit and read Ulysses or any of his work I find that it's better to read it out loud and I hear the music of it. Working with Michael, I discovered the importance of the sound of words."

Bush said he had been intimidated by Joyce before he began working on the show, and broke through that when Brielle had him read Joyce's words aloud. "In one point of the show, Joyce talks about having perfected every line of Ulysses. It's almost like a composition," he said.

This is a real musical too, an old-fashioned musical with songs, not a "serious play with music," generally serious, strange music without melodies.

Bush observed that "Jonathan is a throwback in the best possible way to the golden age composers of the American musical, because he writes songs."

Irish music informed Brielle's work, he said. "Every score has to have a set of rules. Joyce was a guitar player as well. To me guitar and fiddle have certain rules, harmonically. There is a parallel fifth... it makes it feel very specific. And yet Joyce listened to many kinds of music. There are times we have a little Strauss influence, and a Gaelic influence as well. It depends on what's happening in the scene."

And the music is in the spoken words too, he said. "I was talking to my sound deisnger, Brad Berridge, yesterday, and told him the words in the play are music too, and have to be treated like that for the audience to appreciate the entire piece. It is the sound of words that communicates more than what is written on the page."

BOY MEETS GIRL

The title of the play, Himself and Nora, actually reflects the evolution of Joyce and Nora's relationship, Brielle said. Originally the play was going to be called Himself.

Then, Brielle said, he realized that Joyce's eternal love for Nora was always so important to his writing, unconsciously, and that it took his whole life to figure that out. "The opening number is called 'Himself and Nora' and she's annoyed that it's always himself and Nora. Michael and I discovered, working together, that Joyce died 15 minutes before Nora got back to his hospital room in Zurich. This is the missing 15 minutes where she could have gotten her due from him. That gave us the frame."

Focusing on the frame of that love story offers the audience something relatable about this great man of literature, said Bush. "There's a very universal thing about what marriage is like," he said. "In one scene, Jessica Burrows, who plays Nora, came up to me and said she was having a difficult time in the scene, because all she was doing was nagging him to pay the bills and get the rent paid. And to stop drinking. I told her that's not what's really going on. What's really going on is that you feel he's not paying enough attention to her.

"It's actually like me on Sunday night when I'm putting the house together and my husband is sitting smoking a cigar and not doing a thing and I'm mad at him about something else. I think the audience is really finding a lot of themselves in the story."

Because of this relatability, Brielle stressed, people need not know anything about the two of them before coming to the show, even though "Here was a man with an intellect and a bank of knowledge that only a few people could equal, and here was this uneducated woman who was very smart, this earth woman.

"It was these two forces of nature that allowed Joyce and she to leave Ireland in 1904, umarried, and to face the world with their beliefs, even moving to another Catholic country, to be strong enough, stand up for what they believed, and have their love as a foundation sustaining this."

GETTING TO OPENING NIGHT

The premiere of Himself and Nora has been a long time coming. Brielle has been working on it since 1996. An earlier version of the play was produced at The Old Globe in San Diego, and this version appeared at the New York Musical Theatre Festival last summer. Selections have been performed at the James Joyce Center in Dublin, too.

"A project like this takes so much research to get at the essence of it. It warranted this much time. I traveled at least half a dozen times to Ireland. I spent a week riding horses from pub to pub in the Wicklow mountains. I had to get absorbed in what is very mystical and wonderful, that Joyce was compelled to dig at. And I was seduced by it," said the playwright/composer.

Not having been immersed in Irish culture before meant that he had to take his time to feel it, he said. "I find this specificity of a time and a place and characters inspirational. It's like having a new clothes, to have my soul express itself through this."

Bush said that the play has become richer and deeper in rehearsal. Brielle is an eclectic composer, with some songs sounding like parlor music, some more Irish, and "then suddenly there's a vaudeville number," he said. "I remember there's a number at end of Act One where he gets an invitation from Ezra Pound to come to Paris, and it took me three days to stage it. I kept throwing it out because I was trying to find my own directorial vocabulary. I discovered that when I could make it look as simple as it could be than it was right." Bush told the actors to think of it as a screwball comedy, Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell.

HAPPILY EVER AFTER, HEREAFTER

Bush said that the eclectic music and the sort of stream-of-consciousness to the play fits the subject."Joyce saw the world askew. He didn't see it ordered. I've had to apply that to the tone, but not to sacrifice feeling.

"We're making the audience cry, and I love that. He doesn't die. He does sort of, but he doesn't."

For Brielle, the love story is the paramount thing. "True love can live on," he said.

Himself and Nora, presented by American Theateer Group, by special arrangement with Tritone Productions LLC, is at Hamilton Stage, 360 Hamilton Street, Rahway, NJ, through April 24. Performances are Wednesday - Saturday, 8 p.m., and Sunday, 3 p.m. Call 732-499-8226 or visit www.americanthetaergroup.org for tickets.

Gwen Orel runs the blog and podcast, New York Irish Arts