Jimmy Joyced! A Performance by Donal O'Kelly FREE February 28, 2007

Free



"Everything about this tantalising performance is memorable ... nothing short of 'genius inspired by genius.'" -RTE (Radio Telefís Eireann, Ireland's Public Service Broadcaster)

Prominent Irish actor Donal O'Kelly performs a hilarious monologue that takes us on a journey from Joyce's fraught 22nd birthday in February 1904 to his departure from Ireland with Nora Barnacle in October of that same year. The performance will be preceded by a roundtable discussion featuring several James Joyce specialists.

Ireland's most famous modernist writer, whose work has indelibly marked not only Irish literature but writing worldwide, James Joyce drew extensively in all his work on his experience growing up in Dublin in the late 19th century. Like so many Irish people and so many modernist artists, Joyce lived most of his adult life outside the land of his birth. Still, he continued to set his work in the Ireland he found so inhospitable to his art. In many ways, his reflection on conditions in Dublin in 1904 make him not only one of the foremost European modernist writers, but also a major influence on postcolonial writing in our own times. Jimmy Joyced!, Donal O'Kelly's energetic and colorful production, introduces us deftly to Joyce's life and times as they shaped his work.

Jimmy Joyced! examines the events leading up to James Joyce's departure from Ireland in 1904. Ruled by a London government increasingly uninterested in its welfare, the late 19th-century Ireland of Joyce's youth was a stagnant place decimated by a deadly famine and drained of its people through emigration on a massive scale. Ireland's "paralysis," as Joyce called it, was further exacerbated by the fall of his great hero, Charles Stewart Parnell, whose death in 1891 signaled the end of a coherent and effective opposition to British rule in Ireland in the period. O'Kelly deftly recreates both the epiphanies and the frustrations experienced by the young Joyce, as familial, scholastic, communal and political pressures bear down upon him. In a way probably familiar to many emigrants and exiles over time and across cultures, escape into exile becomes his only option.

Jimmy Joyced! looks back at 1904 through the eyes of JJ Staines, a stallholder in Dublin's Rathmines Market with a dangerous obsession for all things Joycean. JJ drives like a man possessed through the full gamut of James Joyce's marvelous year, from his fraught 22nd birthday in February to his departure from Ireland with Nora Barnacle in October. In between is the frenzy of a young life lived to the full: Joyce's battles with his mad dad, his bronze medal win for singing in the Feis, a crazed night of gunfire in the Sandycove Tower, his rescue from redlight Monto mayhem by the man who would become Leopold Bloom and, above all, his passion for Nora Barnacle, a hotel maid from Galway whom he met and fell in love with, and their fabled walk on June 16 which set the date for Joyce's most famous work, Ulysses.

Roundtable on James Joyce and his Ireland:
The performance will be preceded by a roundtable featuring Joyce specialists from USC and elsewhere who will discuss Joyce's significance in international modernism, his relation to the Ireland of his time and his standing as an exemplary and influential postcolonial writer. Speakers will be Joseph Boone (USC), Margot Norris (UC Irvine) and Vincent Cheng (University of Utah). The panel will be moderated by David Lloyd (USC).

The production:
The one-man show is a punchy combination of physical performance and vocal delivery with musical underscoring, directed by Sorcha Fox. Nominated for a Best Actor award at the Irish Times/ESB Irish Theatre Awards, Jimmy Joyced! played the Irish Cultural Centre Paris on Bloomsday 2005.

Donal O'Kelly:
Donal O'Kelly is a writer and actor. His much-travelled solo plays include the award-winning Catalpa, Bat the Father Rabbit the Son and Jimmy Joyced! He recently completed an Irish tour of his play The Cambria, about Frederick Douglass' voyage to Ireland in 1845, performed with Sorcha Fox.

Other plays include The Dogs (Rough Magic Dublin), Hughie on the Wires, Trickledown Town, The Business of Blood, Farawayan (all Calypso Productions Dublin) Asylum! Asylum! (Peacock, Abbey Theatre; Traverse Edinburgh; Ottawa and Boston), Judas of the Gallarus (Peacock, Abbey Theatre) and The Hand (Dublin Theatre Festival).

He has twice been awarded an Irish Arts Council literature bursary and, in 1999, was awarded the Irish American Cultural Institute Butler Literary Award.

For radio, he has written Running Beast, a play with music based on the life of Hugh O'Neill, Earl of Tyrone, as well as radio versions of Catalpa, Bat the Father Rabbit the Son, The Dogs, Hughie on the Wires and The Cambria, all broadcast on RTE.

As an actor, his movie roles include Bimbo in Roddy Doyle's The Van, and roles in Irish movies Spin the Bottle and I Went Down. He has appeared in Beckett's Act without Words I at the Lincoln Center, Waiting for Godot at the Toronto Winter Garden, Juno and the Paycock at the Abbey Theatre and in Colm Toibin's Beauty in a Broken Place at the Peacock. He has toured Europe, the United States, Canada and Australia with his solo plays.

Organized by David Lloyd (English) and Peter O'Neill (writing program).

For further information on this event:
[email protected]

Official Website: http://www.usc.edu/webapps/events_calendar/custom/113/index.php?category=Item&item=0.861440&active_category=Upcoming