Jawing about Joyce with Mary Job

1. Tell us a little bit about yourself:

I was born in New Jersey, raised in Vermont, and have loved theater all of my life. I have a BA from University of Vermont in American Ethnic Studies, a law degree from Northwestern, and a MA in Theater from MSU. 10 years ago, after practicing labor, education and civil rights law for nearly 20 years, I decided to make my avocation my profession,got my MA in theatre and starting teaching at LCC and MSU. I love gardening, golfing (at which I am mediocre at best), skiing (at which I am very good), reading, knitting, Italy and cats.

2. What was the first show you directed?

Uncommon Women and others by Wendy Wasserstein in the early 80's-- on the principle that if you are going to direct a show, particularly as a new director, direct something you know something about. Since I am a feminist who graduated from a New England college in 1972, (albeit not a 7 sister), was fairly counterculture, it seemed like a good match. It was certainly a lot of fun. It was even more interesting teturn to the play a dozen years later, when I was the age of the characters as they appear in the beginning of the play -- professionals who are looking back on their younger years.

3. What attracts you to James Joyce - I understand you did your dissertation on his works (if that isn't correct please amend my misunderstanding)?

Actually, my undergrad honors dissertation was on the Irish in America, but I used Joyce as my staging area. (It seemed to me that to understand the Irish in America, you needed to understand the Irish in Ireland -- so I started with the Irish writers and thinkers. I first encountered Joyce in college when I took a course in Irish Lit., read his short stories, also Portrait of an Artist and Ulysses. I loved them all. I liked the lyricism of the language, the complexity of the characters, and the complexity and ambivalence of their relationships with their world. This of course mirrors Joyce's own ambivalence -- he first left Ireland in 1904, and permenantly in 1915, but never left off writing about it. (Although I freely admit I never got past the first couple of pages of Finnegans Wake!)

4. What is it about "The Dead" in particular that you are drawn to?

The split focus between the obvious convivality of the party -- in which friends and family argue and celebrate and the sense of aloneness that a person can feel in the midst of all this humanity -- it always seemed so true to me about the way we live our lives. I love the way the story shifts from person to person in terms of the viewpoints.I also loved the view of Gretta, Gabriel's wife. She is initially seen from his perspective and through his eyes, so the assumption is that he knows her -- that she is completely 'knowable". When he realizes that she has had an emotional life of which he is and never has been a part, he is profoundly shaken, and the essential aloneness of being human is so beautifully portrayed at the end of the story. There is also a sense that something has changed forever -- an old life permenantly left behind. When I was 22 and read the story, I saw the elegaic mood at the end of the story as evocative of how the Irish who came to America must have felt in leaving Ireland -- their pasts and their dead behind them but still following them westward. So I used the story at the first reading in a Seminar I taught on the Irish in America. Now when I read the story at 58, I see it more in an intimate vein, I too have my dead and their memory is both sweet and haunting. In the play I love the way the authors use a sense of ebb and flow to create moments on which one character stands out before merging in the general flow of the party. I love the understated quality of the play, the sense of intimacy -- as if the audience is a member of the party. Riverwalk's thrust stage is made for this kind of production! I also encourage the audience to sit on the sides of the auditorium -- they will get the sense of intimacy of the play far better than if they sit in the 7th row of the front!

5. How do you think the audience will relate to these characters?

What do you hope the audience will walk away after the show feeling? I hope that the audience will both like the people and identify with them -- to see their interactions on this evening of a family party as universal of the human experience. Life is joy, conflict, song & celebration and death. The snow of life -- real or metaphorical covers us all. The story is about an epiphany that we all experience, even if that moment of epiphany is frightenly solitary. I also hope that the audience goes away having both experienced and shared in moments of life at its most celebratory and social and at its most quietly introspective.

6. What do you find difficult or challenging about directing this particular show, verus something like Shakespeare or other classical pieces of drama?

Plays like this one are almost anti-classical in the sense that it is all subtext-- the text certainly gives you clues , but the details about the emotional arc of the characters are unspoken or suggested whereas in Shakespeare or other classical plays like the Greeks, the emotional life of the character, his or her motivations are the words -- in the sounds, shapes, poetic devices of the language. So here the actors and I have to infer-to fill the gaps and build the characters and the relationships with a different creative process. It gives a lot of scope for individual actors to create the characters and is also incredibly challenging. The characters are not handed to you. You really have to work at it and not take the play for granted. I use not only the original short story, but other characters in other Joyce stories or what I know about Joycean literature in general.

7. What do you think James Joyce's opinion would be of this adaptation of his short story (considered by some scholars to be the most insightful piece of short literature in all of Western history)?

I think he would love the musicality because his language is so musical. I also think that his sense of humor and irony is stronger in the story. The characters in the play are less trivial than in the story,and I think Joyce would have preferred more astringency! On the other hand, Joyce was a notoriously difficult person to be around and I suspect Lansing audiences will love the play the way it is. More compassionate and closer to our sense of family and memory.

8. How would you describe Gabriel, and Gretta?

Gabriel is a urbane, slightly stuffy, but a likable man. He is used to being the favorite nephew and the center of attention. He is an intellectual and a watcher; this sense of being a bystander is partly because he is an intellectual, but also because he is risk adversive. I think that explains his cynicism about the Irish Nationalist movement. Although he is not a supporter of British rule, he is unwilling to commit to the messy reality of revolution, so he sits on the fence. While he is a devoted husband, he also takes his wife for granted. He thinks he knows everything about her-and there is a touch of the Pygmalion about their relationship-he has had a hand in turning a country girl into this gracious and elegant woman. Gretta is warm-a natural care-giver, with a quiet strength, but there is a sense of reserve as well. Something hidden or sheltered. She has acquired a sense of polish in the years of her wife and motherhood, but there is also hints of the "country-cute"girl she was. She is accustomed to being a bit of an outsider in this family, of once being the country girl in a household of urban sophiscates. In the course of the play, we discover the depths of her emotional life, how she treasures the moment when someone found her special, in a way that for all his devotion, Gabriel never did.

Quick Questions:

1. What is your favorite line from any show?

WAKE THE DEAD!

2. How does theatre enrich your life?

It is all about the communication. As a director, I communicate with the author and the actors, who communicate with the audience. I get to tell my take on a story by collaborating with other talents who in turn shape my understanding.

3. Why is classical theatre still pertinent to audiences?

Because it is part of what shapes current theatre. Because so many of the plays are good! They are often universal in theme and in the human experience. Thus they are both familiar and new. They can be wonderfully escapist. Wouldn't you like to be in the Forest of Arden right now, teaching a lover how to be a lover with wit and humor as in As You Like It? Or outwitting both fraternal authority and a lover's less than faithful tendencies in The Rover with wit and verve? (Frank Rutledge & I always thought The Rovers was essentially Spring Break in 18th Century Naples!)

4. What is your favorite part of directing a show?

The whole rehearsal period -- communicating with actors and collaborating with them and the designers deepens my connection with both the play and my fellow collaborators.