O.C. THEATER / JAN HERMAN : James Joyce’s Women Revealed . . . Literarily

If Fionnula Flanagan were to write a memoir of her life in the theater, she could easily start with an anecdote about the time she performed nude on stage in Emporia, Kan.

She was touring in “James Joyce’s Women” during the early ‘80s. The play, directed by Burgess Meredith, had been launched in Costa Mesa several years before at South Coast Repertory.

Flanagan had not only written and produced the play but had also portrayed all six of its female characters. Three were taken from the great Irish author’s life: his wife Nora and his publishers Harriet Weaver and Sylvia Beach. Three were adapted from his fiction: the Washerwoman in “Finnegan’s Wake” and Gerty MacDowell and Molly Bloom in “Ulysses.”

On the day the show came to the small Kansas town, a local Baptist minister denounced Flanagan in the Emporia Gazette as “the whore of Babylon.” His feelings of moral outrage--prompted by the undeniable fact that she played an X-rated Molly--took up at least half a broad-sheet page.

“As you might imagine, once that article appeared it was almost impossible to buy a ticket,” the Dublin-born actress recalled in an interview at her airy, rustic home in Beverly Hills. “Everybody came out to see the show. People were hanging out of the rafters.”

Flanagan, who still speaks with a mild but lilting Irish brogue though she has lived in California for the last 20 years, paused to wonder whether she was creating the wrong impression.

“I don’t want to mislead your readers,” she said.

As much as she’d like to draw a sellout crowd Monday night at the Irvine Barclay Theatre, where she will give a staged reading of Molly’s legendary monologue from the last chapter of “Ulysses,” Flanagan emphasized that she will be fully clothed for the occasion.

She has, after all, acquired “something of a reputation” for playing Molly in the buff--the first time on Broadway in “Ulysses in Night Town”--a 1973 Tony-nominated performance, incidentally, opposite Zero Mostel--and again in her 1985 movie remake of “James Joyce’s Women.”

That said, Flanagan continued her tale of Emporia with a warm, throaty laugh:

“The theater there was a low building, more like an auditorium, with windows facing out onto the street. The house manager asked me if it was all right to pull back the curtains covering the windows because the people who couldn’t get in wanted to have a look.

“They would never have shown up for Molly Bloom. But they wouldn’t have missed ‘the whore of Babylon.’ They were standing in the rain. It was coming out of the heavens like out of a sieve. Everybody said it was the worst storm in 120 years. Meanwhile, the woman in charge wanted to send to Kansas City for state troopers to prevent any violence. It was hysterical.”

The next day a glowing notice appeared in the newspaper. Not only wasn’t the reviewer upset by her full frontal nudity or her simulated masturbation, he believed the town had discovered a star.

“I’ve been discovered many times, but they were staking their own claim,” Flanagan said. “It was very charming. I was even told the editor had held the presses for the review.

“That’s what I want on my tombstone: She held the presses of the Emporia Gazette .”

Reading Molly’s entire monologue aloud may be the more majestic and difficult feat. It is a stream of consciousness that goes for 45 pages as Molly drifts off to sleep late at night thinking about her life, recalling her romances, venting her feelings about large and small injustices and, eventually, bringing herself to a sexual climax.

Flanagan says it takes roughly three hours to perform the monologue aloud from beginning to end without an intermission.

“I don’t even pause for a glass of water,” she noted. “The only way to get the emotional peaks and valleys of her thoughts is to read the whole soliloquy out loud. You discover the total brilliance of Joyce’s construction. It really doesn’t happen when you read it silently.”

The reading--billed as a featured presentation at next week’s scholarly “California Joyce” conference on the UC Irvine campus--will be her second in as many weeks. She recently did the monologue in New York for Symphony Space at its annual Bloomsday on Broadway celebration. That version, she said, will be issued on audiocassette later this year.

“As far as fictional women go, what Joyce gave us in Molly Bloom was extraordinary,” Flanagan said. “He allowed her to be not just funny, wise, sloppy, compassionate, earthy and sexy but also angry, petty, resentful, stupid and lonely. He allowed all of those dimensions. And that’s what makes her so satisfying to play.”

Having researched Joyce’s life extensively for her own writings, Flanagan said she came to admire his humility as an artist.

“He never presumed what people felt or thought,” she explained. “He had every right to because he was so insightful. But he kept copious notes on everything--what his wife said, her chatter, her dreams. He always asked questions.

“He would ask the waiter at the table what he thought about something. That in itself would be good reporting. But his genius was to bring his humanity, his learning and his imagination--and, of course, his knowledge of language--to bear upon his reporting.”

Despite her admiration and her Dublin heritage, the red-haired actress didn’t become deeply involved with Joyce’s work until after she came to America in 1968 to appear on Broadway in Irish playwright Brian Friel’s “Lovers.”

During her youth, because of her familiarity with so many Joycean landmarks, she tended to take him for granted.

Born in 1941, the year Joyce died, she grew up “on the north side of the Liffy” (the river that divides the city) and went to school in Eccles Street, where Joyce had placed the Bloom household.

As a child, Flanagan recalled, she also used to hear her parents refer to the author as though he were alive (“Joyce said this or Joyce said that”), and she presumed she would meet him or he would be pointed out to her on the street.

“It wasn’t until I was in my teens that I realized he was dead,” she recalled. “When I went to school in the morning on the bus I would see shops on the way and landmarks Joyce spoke of in his books. They were still there then.

“So when I came to read ‘Ulysses,’ it was like reading the newspaper: In Eccles Street today a boy got knocked off his bicycle by a taxicab. It was extremely difficult for me, and always has been, to think of the people in ‘Ulysses’ as fictional. I’ve never regarded the book as a novel. I’ve always regarded it as a documentary.”

In another interesting coincidence, Flanagan’s father, like Leopold Bloom, worked for a Dublin newspaper. He wrote first for the Evening Press and then for the Irish Press and eventually turned to selling advertising. “In that sense,” she said, “he was absolutely Bloom-esque.”

They differed, however, in other particulars.

“My father had been a captain in the Irish army,” Flanagan recalled. “He’d fought in Spain, and I don’t think he ever quite recovered from the fact that Franco won. When he came back to Ireland, he suffered because of that. He was a rebel, an Irish nationalist and a socialist. Both my mother and father were. They were ‘read off the altar.’

“My father had an amazing Joyce look, a thin face with glasses. He was sort of a Dublin character who was known around town. When he died three years ago, somebody wrote a nice obituary in the Irish Times, an appreciation that characterized him as a boulevardier, which was absolutely true. That is exactly what he was.”

In keeping with her family’s beliefs, Flanagan was sent to a Gaelic high school and became fluent in the language.

“I’m glad I wasn’t educated to sit on the fence,” she said. “I believe firmly in nationhood, and unless you have a national language and a national character, it’s impossible to have a nation. When I came across Joyce talking about that, it seemed so natural it didn’t even ring bells.”

Indeed, after training for a year at the Abbey Theatre, Flanagan got her first leading role on stage in a Gaelic drama. She played an unmarried young woman who becomes pregnant and is driven from her village.

Asked to reprise the role in English, Flanagan, who was then 22, gave up her job as a schoolteacher and soon found herself working full time as an actress on both Irish and English television.

American television viewers may remember her best for her 1976 Emmy Award-winning performance in the ABC miniseries “Rich Man, Poor Man.” She played Clothilde, the housekeeper with whom Nick Nolte’s character falls in love. Their bathtub scene caused a bit of a sensation.

She was also widely seen several years later as an Emmy-nominated principal in the ABC series “How the West Was Won.” She played Aunt Molly, the pioneer woman who came from Chicago.

But the theater remains a central focus of her career.

In 1992 she created the role of Gaby in “Unfinished Stories” at the Mark Taper Forum. She also appeared in the title role of “The Countess Cathleen” for the 1992 Yeats Festival at the Abbey. The year before she played Winnie in “Happy Days” for the International Samuel Beckett Festival at the Gate Theatre in Dublin.

Flanagan also directs in the theater. In 1991 she staged Janet Noble’s “Away Alone,” about the plight of illegal Irish immigrants, at the Court Theatre in West Hollywood and restaged it at the Abbey.

In addition, she writes screenplays, directs radio plays and is currently working on an educational documentary about Los Angeles firefighters and paramedics.

“I always knew from the beginning I was mogul material,” Flanagan quipped.

As if that were not enough to keep her busy, she and her psychiatrist husband Garrett O’Connor--an expert on drug and alcohol abuse who teaches at UCLA medical school--have just formed the Institute for Innocence.

And what precisely is that?

“Oh that,” she said, “is a research project. It is designed to find out what it means to be an Irish Catholic.”

* Fionnula Flanagan will give a staged reading of the entire Molly Bloom episode from James Joyce’s “Ulysses” on Monday at 8 p.m. at the Irvine Barclay Theatre, 4242 Campus Drive, Irvine. $15; $8 students. (714) 854-4646 or (714) 740-2000 (Ticketmaster).