“The Dead”—the final piece in James Joyce’s masterful 1914 short story collection, Dubliners—takes place 12 days after Christmas, on the Feast of the Epiphany. That’s the holy day commemorating the revelation of the Christ child to the Magi—an awfully grand way of describing three guys looking at a baby in a barnyard. But for Joyce the essential banality of the occasion was sort of the point. Though Dubliners is full of epiphanies, it’s precisely the ordinary stuff that triggers them. In “The Dead,” the moment of revelation arrives not with angelic trumpets but with a quiet shift in thought.
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On the page, Joyce sticks closest to the thoughts of Gabriel Conroy, an exceptionally ill-at-ease literary critic attending the annual holiday party thrown by his elderly aunts and their niece. Sensitive and self-conscious, Gabriel spends the evening blushing, trying to turn a phrase, wishing he were elsewhere, and hating himself. He overreacts to teasing from a female colleague and takes the prospect of having to give an after-dinner speech way too seriously. “A shameful consciousness of his own person assailed him,” Joyce writes. “He saw himself as a ludicrous figure . . . a nervous well-meaning sentimentalist, orating to vulgarians and idealising his own clownish lusts.” If you’ve ever felt awkward at a party, I’m sure you can relate.
In fact, there’s no main character at all in Nelson’s book, which frames “The Dead” as an ensemble-driven affair. The bulk of the show’s 100 minutes is taken up with performances of Davey’s parlor songs, mainly based on traditional Irish poems and ditties. The idea seems to be to let music serve the function that the commonplace serves in Dubliners: a conduit for revelation, transformation, the expression of something essential.
Nelson’s script also succumbs to drippiness, particularly in its handling of soon-to-die Aunt Julia. At one point she sings a wistful duet with her younger self. At another, a tenor sings her an aria as she smiles beatifically and reaches toward heaven.
Through 12/9: Wed-Thu 7:30 PM, Fri 8 PM, Sat 3 and 8 PM, Sun 2:30 and 7:30 PM, Court Theatre, 5535 S. Ellis, 773-753-4472, courttheatre.org, $45-$65.
