Dreaming up drama

MOTE RANCH — Jack Gilhooley’s office looks like what he calls it — a “man cave.”

Posters and flyers for his plays line the walls. He points to one — “The Time Trial” — whose cast bears a now-famous name: Tommy Lee Jones.

A black TV takes up half the room and sits opposite a beige couch placed beneath a tapestry of a bull and his mate.

A small laptop appears on his desk, nearly buried behind stacks of papers. But it’s here where Gilhooley creates.

An award-winning playwright, Gilhooley this week brought to life one of his newest creations, “She’ll Stick to Ye.”

The roughly 100-minute play, which debuted Jan. 13, at Art Center Sarasota, with a reading and performance by veteran actresses Donna Gerdes and Annette Breazeale, explores the life of Nora Barnacle Joyce, the paramour and eventual wife of the great Irish novelist James Joyce, author of “Ulysses.”

“She’ll Stick to Ye” is a fantasy situation in 1946, following Joyce’s death in 1941. Bitter about Ireland’s refusal to allow James Joyce to be buried in his home country, Nora Joyce returns to Ireland to speak to a women’s group, where she slowly chases the audience away with her remarks.

A longtime member of the James Joyce Society of Sarasota — a group dedicated to reading and discussing Joyce’s works — Gilhooley anxiously awaited the works of Joyce to become public domain in 2012. He wrote a play about Joyce and his protégé, Samuel Beckett, but wanted to write something else.

What developed was “She’ll Stick to Ye.”

“Nora is much more theatrically interesting than James,” Gilhooley says. “James is kind of negative. But she isn’t. She’s funny. She’s feisty.

“When I decided to write about Nora, I just wrote and wrote and wrote,” he says.

The play will be performed again in February — no date yet set — at Home Resource, a furniture store in Sarasota.

And, Gilhooley says, it will be read by a theater in London in February, as well. The London theater also plans to perform it again on “Bloomsday,” June 16 — the day Joyce and Nora met.

“I hope they want to do it for more than one day,” he says.

Although Gilhooley is a fan of Joyce, he says future plays will center on another topic.

“Joyce is hard to sell,” he says.

Center stage
Jack Gilhooley’s “The Time Trial” has been reissued by Broadway Play Publishing. He has productions in Tampa and California this year.

Additionally, he and his wife, Jo Morello, will see their work, “Life Upon the Wicked Stage,” come to life Jan. 8, at Studio@620, in St. Petersburg.

The play, which is a collection of shorter plays about theater, will be performed at the venue Jan. 9 through Jan. 11 and at other Tampa area venues through Feb. 4, as well.

The show is being produced by Gypsy Stage Repertory.