In She’ll Stick to Ye, we must imagine that we are in Dublin, Ireland, as the participants in a meeting of the Irish Women’s Literary Society. It is 1946. We fill the simple lecture room to hear Nora Barnacle Joyce speak of her late husband James and her life with him. Proper Annette Breazeale, as Mrs. Grace McVey with softly tailored suit and hat, hosts. She gives a cordial welcome to the speaker and promises tea afterward. She has to keep order occasionally and swiftly smooths over the exit of a few. That’s not to say she’ll approve unreservedly of every word we hear.
When James Joyce’s father met Nora Barnacle, his prediction to his son gave playwright Jack Gilhooley his title. And she did “stick” to James from their first meeting in June of 1904, through their marriage and two children 24 years later, and his death in 1941. “I’m his living presence,” Nora says at one point. Donna Gerdes makes it a lively one.
Though Gilhooley covers Joyce’s entire career via Nora’s remarks, the facts come well chosen, edited via still-vivacious Nora’s point of view, and delivered without mannerisms or hesitation. She justifies being (here fictionally, of course) in Dublin as a “sacred place” for James Joyce, who laid the action of all of his books there.
The narrative ranges through Nora and James’s life from Ireland to Switzerland, Italy, France (with Paris central), England (briefly), his few trips back to Ireland, and finally Switzerland (Zurich). Nora talks about his works and especially the difficulties publishing “Ulysses” and how he never forgave the Abbey Theater for not accepting “Exiles.”
Nora tells of all the writers she and James knew and their mutual opinions, along with their constant fiscal struggles. She describes their children Lucia and George, and the mental problems of the former. Of course we want to question certain things about Nora and she answers speculations about whether she is Molly Bloom. At one point, she decides to read from a letter, making Grace McVey worried about possible smutty contents. The lecture goes on, though. Nora even speculates about a “correct” title of “Finnegan’s Wake.”
The lively delivery by diminutive Donna Gerdes’ Nora under the watchful eyes--and ultimately, protection--of Annette Breazeale’s McVey, makes facts seem to most of us like entertaining fiction. The play needs little more than a lecture setting, so that it was at home at New College, as it had been in a previous performance at Art Center Sarasota and may be in Tampa.
