The Brooklyn Rail

When I told people I was going to see a staged adaptation of James Joyce’s Ulysses, the frequent response was a sharp eyebrow raise and a: “that should be interesting.” This is a 783-page novel of much-hyped obscurity that people don’t say they are “reading” but rather “wresting with.” Even this production’s own press materials called it “the Mount Everest of twentieth-century literature.”

But if anyone could be up to the challenge, it is Elevator Repair Service (ERS), the theater ensemble best known for Gatz, their luminous adaptation of The Great Gatsby that, at a run time of over six hours and featuring every one of Fitzgerald’s sentences, can hardly be classified as an adaptation at all. It is a marriage of theater and narrative fiction that somehow, effortlessly, brings out the best of both art forms.

There is nothing effortless about Joyce’s epic novel, Ulysses. Following the goings-on on June 16, 1904 of Stephen Dedalus, the ever-searching and frequently drunk poet from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Leopold Bloom, a Jewish advertising salesman whose wife Molly is having an affair with the shallow Blazes Boylan, it is such a tangled web of inner thoughts, formal experimentations, and references ranging from Shakespeare to local Dublin crime drama that it helped ignite the now commonplace handwringing about the death of the novel.

Ulysses, which runs through March 1 at The Public as part of the Under the Radar Festival, opens with that air of seriousness: a massive white table that stretches across the entire stage is lined with neat rows of scripts and mini plastic water bottles. A projected white clock hovers above like a ghost. Scott Shepherd, an ever-magnetic performer and co-director of the production with ERS founder and Artistic Director John Collins, wanders out to tell the audience they will read the whole book, but that, a sheepish smile forming, they will “have to fast forward once in a while.” Then the other six actors, dressed in dark suits, march out solemnly to their seats behind the table.

And we’re off: the clock is set to 8 a.m. and Stephanie Weeks (a shining point in an excellent ensemble) reverently reads that famous opening line about stately, plump Buck Mulligan and his bowl of lather. I could almost see the thousands of sentences to come stretching ahead like the Himalayas. But it didn’t take long for this spell to be broken: thirty seconds in, Weeks’s reading is interrupted by the roar of a tape machine as the text of the novel projected on the wall behind her scrolls ahead, the clocks spins forward, and the actors are thrown back in their seats by the gusty winds of time. They look frazzled, a realization dawning on them and the audience: this will be more a sprint than a marathon.

Despite being based on a book four times as long as The Great Gatsby, Ulysses, with its frequent tape-squealing jumps, covers all eighteen of Ulysses’s episodes in just two hours and thirty minutes. If Gatz was theater as an ode to reading, Ulysses is theater as an ode to skimming—which feels honest to my experience with both these novels. To read The Great Gatsby is to follow a clear, ever-digestible journey—there’s a reason there are more reimagings of that text than stars in the sky—while to read Ulysses is to wander, with the characters as well as with your own mind, which, totally overwhelmed by the deluge of details, gropes desperately onto images and ideas as they float by without any single discernible narrative.

The show speeds through Dedalus’s (played with a surprising sharp, sardonic edge by Christopher Rashee Stevenson) morning as he wanders from his apartment to the college and then the beach, and then restarts the day with Bloom (embodied with a perfect mixture of humaneness and patheticness by a superb Vin Knight), as he too ventures out to shop, attend a funeral, go to work, and eat at a bar.

Details I thought were critical (my personal favorite: Bloom’s belief that the “I.N.R.I.” above Christ stands for “Iron Nails Ran In”) in my reading were left out, but others (Dedalus leaving his snot on the rock on the beach, Bloom spotting the rat scurrying in his friend’s grave) I had failed to grasp struck me anew. This was not a straight-forward adaptation of Ulysses, which by the nature of the book is impossible, but rather the experience of reading Ulysses from the mind of another.

While there were a few striking visual moments—the company bent over slow-motion eating wads of lettuce and glugging beer in episode eight— the action for the first half of the show stayed stubbornly behind the imposingly large table. (When I see a table that large on a stage my first thought is: when are we breaking this apart?) While this lack of surprising image-making was intended to draw our attention to the contours of Joyce’s prose, at times it felt over-eager. For example: in episode ten, a sweeping overview of the movements of every type of person in Dublin, including priests, shopkeepers, and government officials, is portrayed in total darkness with the text scrolling on the wall behind and the voices rising disembodied.

There were also moments Shepherd would pull the production out of its mode of reading by pausing the action and making explanatory asides to the audience. I could have imagined this character as a parody of the suffocating amount of scholarship on the novel (Nabokov described Ulysses as “a divine work of art [that] will live on despite the academic nonentities who turn it into a collection of symbols or Greek myth”), but his asides were so random and infrequent they were nothing but a distraction. One particularly awkward moment was in their adaptation of the episode twelve bar scene in which the barflies become inflamed in antisemitic conspiracy theories regarding Bloom, culminating in his passionate response to them that real life is love, the opposite of “hatred, history.” But just as the tension in the scene reached a fever pitch, Shepherd froze it to remind us that “you can’t trust” the unnamed antisemite narrating this particular episode. Alrighty, then. But since when could we trust the other narration—any of this?

By the end of the first half, this overall lack of movement behind that damn table caused the scenes to morph blurrily together. (An experience I certainly had reading the text, sure, but still boring.) But after intermission, the production finally seems to capture that magic of Ulysses, which has too long been buried by its reputation: it’s weird as hell. This is a book that includes the line “O! Weeshwashtkissinapooisthnapoohuck?” for God’s sake.

Episode fifteen of Ulysses, a madcap hallucination at the brothel, is written by Joyce as a surrealist play and I can imagine the directors breathing a sigh of relief as they got to this section. Now we can play. And boy do they. Papers fly, the table is pulled apart, Shepherd, in green googles, pulls baby dolls out of a convulsing Bloom, Dedalus’s mother rises in streams of smoke above her quivering son. With the stage cleared, the last forty minutes of the show cast away its heavy coat and transformed from staid reading to theatrical exuberance. In the penultimate episode, Bloom and Dedalus turn away from the audience, pissing side by side at a raised upper corner of the stage. The cast is arrayed on levels all around them. The pair is framed in a fading, warm light. I could at last feel the gravity of the text, the Everest of it all, being replaced by an intimacy, an aliveness, that theater captures best.

By the time that final episode rolls around with Molly Bloom’s (magnificently embodied by Maggie Hoffman) famous stream of consciousness monologue touching on everything from her affair, to her dead son, to farting, to her and her husband’s youthful intimacy on Howth Head, its sudden stillness feels earned. The rushing stops—they let her do every sentence. No squealing tape, no jumping in time, yes, there comes a time when there is only one Ulysses, yes, when all that is needed is to read, yes, to read, yes, to see, yes, heart beating in the audience, yes, yes, to experience, yes.