Lucia Mad

By: Don Nigro

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Synopsis: Dark comic drama / 4m, 2f / Simple set / This lyrical, intensely funny and haunting play about the madness of James Joyce's beloved daughter Lucia traces the imagined course of her doomed love for the young Samuel Beckett and investigates the relationship of creation to love and madness. Joyce is living in Paris and deeply absorbed in the composition of his last great work in progress eventually to become his enigmatic masterpiece Finnegan's Wake . He adores his beautiful and gifted daughter Lucia, but is unable to give her the attention she craves. Her down to earth, no nonsense mother, Nora, also loves her, but must spend much of her time looking after her absent minded genius husband. When Joyce's young disciple Beckett appears, Lucia falls madly in love with him and Beckett is torn between his reverence for Joyce, his compassion for Lucia, and his terror of her bottomless need for love. Lucia has a sharp eye and a wicked sense of humor, and she retains both as she slips deeper and deeper into madness despite the best efforts of Joyce, Nora, Beckett, Jung and Napoleon. This is a wildly funny play with complex and vivid characters, rich language and an eerie, eccentric and melancholy beauty.