Lucia's Chapters of Coming Forth by Day

Priceless: Ruth Maleczech, member of Mabou Mines and downtown-theater doyenne for 40 years, spitting insults against Carl Jung and Ezra Pound from a wooden chair that flies, suspended, over the stage of what is normally P.S. 122 but here is called the Mabou Mines ToRoNada Space. As Lucia Joyce, James' youngest daughter, languishing in her final years in a mental institution in Northampton, England, Maleczech hovers (literally) between an elevated fantasy life and an insufferable reality. What sustains her, and the audience, is a defiance so blistering that it nearly burns the theater down.

Writer and director Sharon Fogarty, another Mabou Mines member, presents the story of Lucia Joyce as a dark, censored chapter in the history of modernism. A free spirit whose family had her institutionalized in her teenage years, Lucia gradually lost her grip on reality, after which her doting but work-obsessed father wrote down her loopy language to channel it into "Finnegans Wake." James, a shadowy presence in the show, is played by Paul Kandel, a consummate performer who is gracious enough to accept his back seat to Maleczech's star turn.

Most of "Lucia's Chapters of Coming Forth by Day" is spent watching Maleczech in her occasionally airborne chair. A Beckettian heroine with a Joycean vocabulary, Lucia leaps from charming to churlish to furious to seductive to bitter, biding her time until she is rescued by her "doctors" or by death. "Bad news" is her wry refrain, delivered each time she realizes that she's not going anywhere. Jim Clayburgh's sets and lights, combined with Julie Archer's artful projections, wrap Lucia in haunting white images of a late-Victorian ghost story.

Fogarty's play is admirably constructed, a monument to a lost life, but a lesser actor might make it a snoozer. Maleczech turns her old age into a weapon, daring us to dismiss her (and Lucia) as a relic. A dragon protecting the cave of her secrets, all written down in the "chapter book" she clutches to her side, Maleczech's Lucia is fueled by the magnitude of her wretchedness. By the time she dances her manic final dance, she has made the case that to ignore Lucia Joyce—and Ruth Maleczech—is to disregard a treasure in our midst.
 
Presented by and at Mabou Mines, 150 First Ave., 2nd floor, NYC. Sept. 18–25. Tue.–Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 3 p.m. (212) 868-4444 or www.smarttix.com.