I’m not what you’d call a Joycean. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and the stories of Dubliners appeal but they’re the base of the mountain as the author moved away from naturalism and into the sterner stuff of modernism. I’m pretty sure a college class assigned readings of Finnegans Wake and I’m really sure I didn’t make much headway through them. In other words don’t expect me to partake in any Bloomsday celebrations come June 16, commemorating the day Ulysses, his magnum opus, takes place. But I was intrigued by the notion of a three-hour distillation of the text, now at the Public Theater.
James Joyce, I confess, wasn’t the draw. It was rather the company, Elevator Repair Service, that brought me to Martinson Hall on a frigid evening in “Dry January,” a month of early 21st century penance the author, an ardent chronicler of debauchery a century ago, would surely have bemoaned. Their Gatz was among the Public’s finest hours–eight, to be precise, as the group performed every word of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby in a humdrum office setting transformed by the resplendent text and impish stage magic. All 700 pages of Ulysses required downsizing, and explaining. Co-director (with John Collins), dramaturge, and co-star Scott Shepherd appears at the outset to set the scene and discuss how this adaptation will free the book “from the professors who Joyce said would be studying the book forever” (true, as its flights of prose fancy and minutiae about Dublin street life continue to absorb scholars). “Every reading is a misreading,” he says, which may explain why Henry Mancini’s jazzy score to the sleight-of-hand thriller Charade is among the musical selections played as we take our seats. With that creative license in mind off we go through bits and pieces of its eighteen chapters, a bawdy and breathless ramble that ends with a famed (and infamous) soliloquy by one of its characters.
Here the seven actors gather around a conference table, perhaps reading and misreading Ulysses. An omnipresent clock hovers over the set, as a kind of moon over what we might imagine to be the River Liffey. Joyce borrowed his title and concept from Homer but no one will mistake this for Christopher Nolan’s upcoming big screen blockbuster, as the actors slip in and out of different personas, all observed on that single day in 1904…the day Joyce met (and is said to have sex with) his longtime partner and wife, Nora Barnacle. There’s obviously a lot of close, almost architectural observation stuffed into the book but the company has selected its choicest, funniest, and naughtiest parts to dramatize, and while the show will have you pondering the vagaries of life, love, and heavy drinking you’ll also leave thinking, with awed admiration, “Joyce was a perv!” Ulysses gave the censors fits, and can still raise eyebrows today.
At one point Shepherd-as-guide intercedes to say “now it gets really experimental” and the audience laughs, as the preceding hour or so wasn’t exactly Netflix and chill. It defies plot summary; suffice it to say we’re on a journey with ad salesman Leopold Bloom (Vin Knight), who is circumnavigating back to his marital bed with Molly (Maggie Hoffman). Molly, his voluptuous opera singer wife, has cucked him with her manager, the manly Blazes Boylan (Shepherd), and he drowns his sorrows with Stephen Dedalus (Christopher Rashee-Stevenson), teacher, scribe, and the artist as young man in the Joyce I could relate to. Taunted by antisemites (there aren’t a lot of Jews in small-minded, nationalistic Ireland) and his own anxieties Bloom isn’t always easy to hang with but Knight gives an expert, Stan Laurel-ish performance, the definition of “mild” until he breaks. As in Gatz the stage gradually accumulates props (the birth of octuplets is a tour-de-force for the scenic designers at Dots and prop designer Patricia Marjorie), incisive shafts of light (designed by Marika Kent), projected maps (from Matthew Deinhart), an immersive soundscape (via Ben Williams), plus lots of rolling fog. All of it supports, rather than overwhelms, the text and the cast, with Hoffman superbly giving earthy voice to Molly in that concluding, orgasmic scene. (How did Joyce write it then? Would anyone, any man anyway, dare to write it now?)
It doesn’t all work, however. The fast-forwarding through the chapters, VHS tape-style, grates, and Joyce simply isn’t as embraceable as Fitzgerald. But there weren’t too many walkouts at intermission. You do get invested in it, and venturesome audiences largely unfamiliar with Ulysses (hello) will want to see where it goes. (Joyceans will get a kick out of the avant-garde Classics Illustrated approach.) Me? I’m not sure I’m prepared to participate in a Bloomsday reading, but I was sufficiently educated and entertained.
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