Finnegans One-Man Show

“No, I do not think I’m familiar with it,” Daniel W. Erickson ’14 says of James Joyce’s “Finnegans Wake.” It’s a strange statement, given that Erickson is performing a one-man stage adaptation of the work—titled “Here Comes Everybody”—to open on Thursday in the Adams Pool Theatre. But since Joyce’s novel  is such a challenging work of fiction, only a select few can ever profess to be familiar with it as one would be familiar with a novel, song, or sitcom.

The text of the book is uniquely challenging; it employs some 20 different languages, often using multiple languages in a single sentence—or word—to form cross-lingual puns.

The simplest way Erickson can describe the essence of the book—and, of course, his show—is that it captures the dreamscape of a man’s mind as he sleeps. Erickson’s adaptation does not root the story’s slippery plot to something as concrete; on the contrary, he intends to avoid concreteness.

In fact, he’s been trying to eliminate his take on the novel altogether from the performance. “These last few months I’ve been trying to think of ways to present this text to the audience, to give them some kind of key in a way that doesn’t force them down certain paths that I like,” he says.

Erickson is aware of the work’s perplexing nature. He doesn’t expect his audience to understand it; his goal is to build appreciation.

“My favorite result of putting this piece on would be to just have everybody in the audience try to read ‘Finnegans Wake’ in the next 30 years and get through 10 pages without being just so fucking annoyed!” he says.