The cost of her inheritance

James Joyce had two children, Giorgio and Lucia . Lucia was his favorite. "Whatever spark or gift I possess," he once said, "has been transmitted to Lucia , and it has kindled a fire in her brain." That fire eventually turned into a conflagration.

Lucia, who lived from 1907 to 1982, was a remarkable, if troubled, young woman. She spoke four languages and studied dance with Isadora Duncan's brother. She fell in love with her father's assistant, Samuel Beckett , who fended her off, and had a brief affair with sculptor Alexander Calder .

Lucia's behavior turned increasingly erratic, with episodes of violence and even catatonia. After analyzing her, Carl Jung wrote of his patient and her father, "They are like two people going to the bottom of a river, one diving and the other drowning." Lucia spent the last 47 years of her life in mental asylums in France and England.

This Thursday Charlestown Working Theater presents Sharon Fogarty's "Lucia's Chapters of Coming Forth by Day, " a production of New York's Mabou Mines theater company. Fogarty also directs the production. Ruth Maleczech , a storied figure in avant-garde theater circles, plays Lucia.

Both Fogarty and Maleczech are among the six-member Mabou Mines directorship. Fogarty has been with the company since 1999. Maleczech helped found it, in 1970. In separate telephone interviews, they recently discussed "Lucia's Chapters."

A Melrose native who went to Emerson and was briefly part of Boston's now-defunct Reality Theater company, Fogarty first grew interested in Ireland as a 16-year-old when she spent a summer there. "That made a cultural link for me I'd never had before," she said. "And I still have it."

Fogarty read Brenda Maddox's biography of Nora Joyce , Lucia's mother, around the time she joined Mabou Mines. "There are lots of harrowing stories there about Lucia," Fogarty said. In one , she cut the telephone wire in the Joyces' apartment one evening in 1933 when calls of congratulation came in after a US judge ruled that her father's novel "Ulysses" wasn't obscene.

For four years, Fogarty and Mabou Mines colleagues, including Maleczech, researched Lucia's life. They visited Joyce archives throughout the United States and Europe and even went to St. Andrew's, the asylum in Northampton, England, where Lucia spent the final three decades of her life. "We talked to a nurse who knew her at the hospital," Maleczech recalled, "and went to look at her gravesite. It's under a beautiful chestnut tree."

In 2003, Mabou Mines produced Fogarty's first attempt at Lucia's story, "Cara Lucia. " Three actresses played her: Maleczech as the elderly, institutionalized woman; her daughter, Clove Galilee, as the young woman in Paris; and Rosemary Fine as Issy , a character from "Finnegans Wake, " whose presence represents Lucia's considerable influence on Joyce's final novel.

"Cara Lucia" didn't exhaust Fogarty's interest in Lucia Joyce, especially the older woman. "Despite her weaknesses," Fogarty said, "there was somebody there I just found so compelling and fascinating: the sparks and flashes of the mind that was once there."

So Fogarty compressed and clarified "Cara Lucia" for "Lucia's Chapters of Coming Forth by Day." Now there's just one Lucia, with her father the only other character. "Finnegans Wake" almost qualifies as a character, too; both Lucia and Joyce often quote from it. She also frequently breaks into song, and an integral part of the production is the projection of images on and behind the stage.

"What we wanted to make was a poetic work," Fogarty said, "visually poetic, musically poetic, and text-wise -- to find the poetry in her situation."

That situation -- madness, loss, rage -- makes playing Lucia extremely demanding. Maleczech is no stranger to daunting parts. She's played Winnie in Beckett's "Happy Days," and won raves for her Southern-matriarch monarch in Mabou Mines' radical reworking of "King Lear." (The Village Voice said Male c zech's "rendering of 'Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life, and thou no breath at all?' comes as close as our theater will ever come to making Lear, as Doctor Johnson said, virtually unendurable in its pain.")

Maleczech laughed when asked if she prefers such strenuous, bravura roles. "I like small parts in plays with lots of people in them! It is very demanding. It takes a lot of stamina to do it, though it's almost all done sitting down, which is another weird thing about it. She didn't get around very much, Lucia. . . . There are a lot of jumps and twists and turns in the script. So it's emotionally, and linguistically, complex."

There was an innate theatricality to Lucia: her Irishness, her dance background, that "fire" Joyce spoke of. Yet she was no less a real person . Does Maleczech find it liberating or constraining to play a flesh-and-blood character?

"It's tricky, it's really tricky, trying to straddle the line," Maleczech said. "In a way, it's a great privilege to be able to try to approach this life and give it voice. On the other hand, one is maybe stricter, more careful, about not straying too far from what is known. So it has this feeling of privilege and honor attached to it while at the same time there's a responsibility that sometime one doesn't feel with fictional characters."

Mark Feeney can be reached at mfeeney@globe.com.