Exiles at Theatre Y | Theater review

James Joyce’s only published play, 1918’s mannered and psychologically weighted Exiles centers on a love triangle among a troubled author (Rafael Franco) freshly home to Dublin from a long sojourn abroad, his “simple” wife (Melissa Hawkins), and an old friend (David Bettino) pledging to reinstate the author into his erstwhile home in Dublin letters.

Mechanically and disjointedly staged, this production takes its interpretations so oppressively, seriously and slowly that we’re forced to interpret the boredom it inflicts as wholeheartedly deliberate. And, while this was the most aggressively boring show I’ve ever seen, that’s not what makes it so insurmountably frustrating to watch. At the end of each of the play’s three interminable acts, Hawkins lip-synchs a modern pop song expressing the internal emotions her character is incapable of communicating in life. It’s such an invigorating breath of life onstage that we’re overwhelmed with relief at the ability of this stifled woman to express herself passionately, desperately, entirely, even if only in imagination.

When the song ends, we’re plunged back into the world of meaningless style and crushing monotony. As in life. But an audience doesn’t need 150 minutes of repetitive malaise to understand a single theme. This infuriatingly reductive approach pervades throughout, as in an exchange in which two antagonistic men literally kick a rock at each other in a “representation” of competition and hostility so obvious it borders on baffling. Almost worse, Hawkins’s considerable talents fail to be completely buried in this languishing, self-satisfied production: We know the whole time what we’re missing.