Ulysses: A Glorious Voyage

THE MORE IN TOUCH YOU ARE with your inner monologues, the easier it is to read James Joyce’s “Ulysses.” Easier, but still not easy. An autonomic ease informs those fragmented thoughts and abrupt subject changes, but putting them into written words reveals a terrifying jumble. Song lyrics and other quotations; the distraction of a passerby; guilt, anger, hope, regret – each of us is the sum of a culture absorbed. Make that the culture of Dublin in 1904, add more characters whose heads we inhabit, follow them through that city over the course of a single day. That’s “Ulysses.”

Scott Shepherd and Cast
Photo by Maria Baranova

A high-school teacher advised me simply to launch into the book and not allow myself to be dismayed. A half-century later I took that advice, although I had the massive Cambridge Centenary edition in hand. It reproduces the 1922 text and surrounds it with essays and annotations. I was inspired to take on this task in anticipation of seeing a version of the story on stage. By the time I was in my theater seat, I’d gotten halfway through.

New York-based Elevator Repair Service has won an excellent reputation for adapting classic works of literature for the stage. I saw “Gatz,” their version of “The Great Gatsby,” at EMPAC in Troy, NY, in 2008, two years before its acclaimed debut at New York’s Public Theater. Improbably set in a shabby office building, it opened with Scott Shepherd as a frustrated office worker who finds a paperback copy of “Gatsby” in a desk and begins reading it aloud, thus taking on the character of narrator Nick Carraway and soon drawing his fellow-workers into performing the story. Including every word of the book, “he said”s and “she said”s included.

Now we have “Ulysses,” currently onstage at the Luma Theater at Bard College’s Fisher Center, part of this year’s Summerscape program. It runs through July 14, 2024.

Shepherd disarmingly begins this “Ulysses,” too, but with a few sentences of introduction. He notes the large clock on a rear wall, displaying the correct time – but it changes, once the show begins, to display the time of each of the Ulysses episodes, which often overlap. On the stage is a long table, parallel to the proscenium, at which are seven places, each with a bottle of water and a pile of pages.

Before Shepherd entered there was music, a including a jazzy version of “O Sole Mio,” which is mentioned in the text, and I caught a bit of “Love’s Old Sweet Song,” another of the many pieces of music Joyce mentions. Which heralded a carefully thought-out script.

Following his intro, Shepherd took a seat at the table, where he was joined by the six other actors in the cast. They are Stephanie Weeks, Dee Beasanael, Vin Knight, Kate Benson, Maggie Hoffman, and Christopher-Rashee Stevenson. They would take on many characters apiece.

One edition of the novel sports an oversized “S” on the opening page, the initial letter of the initial word, drawing your eye into “Stately.” Here it was Weeks starting us off with “Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead ... ” as Shepherd mimed the narrated movements and murmured Mulligan’s lines.

The Cast of "Ulysses"
Photo by Maria Baranova

He’s summoning his flat-mate, Stephen Dedalus, one of the two major figures alongside whom we’ll be traveling. Stevenson brought a lightness and deceptive ease to the character, a calm that will be chipped away and then shattered as his guilt over the death of his mother morphs into her menacing spectre.

The other major figure, Leopold Bloom, doesn’t appear until Episode Four (“Calypso”), when we also meet Molly, his wife, who is a singer. Although she occupies comparatively little stage time, her presence is pervasive, especially as Leo comes to realize that she’s about to have an affair with the odious Blazes Boylan, her concert manager. An excellent Vin Knight conveys Bloom's stubborn befuddlement with every look and gesture.

But let’s pause the plot for a moment – Joyce certainly does, and often – to look at the mechanics of this production. Co-directed by Shepherd and company founder John Collins, it follows the “Gatz” example by giving us the novel in its entirety. Honest! Text that the actors skip is projected onto the set with the elided lines whipping by as the cast jerks forward into this new moment of time. It’s a clever device, although once we get used to it, it seems intrusive. Fortunately, the text displays and cast reactions grow more restrained over the course of the play.

Joyce’s structure, in 18 episodes, recalls Homer’s “Odyssey,” but the hero’s journey in this case is a trek through Dublin on that single day – June 16, 1904. Staying faithful to Joyce’s intention, this stage version doesn’t try to help make sense of those episodes. This is immersive theater in the best sense of the term. You’re not surrounded by actors; you’re not herded from room to room. Instead, you’re presented a thickly designed text realized through narration and dialogue. You can’t “make sense” of it in any conventional way – it demands a form of surrender. You must glory in the words, and this is a cast that helps savor those words.

There is physicality to enjoy as well. Bloom will be haunted throughout the play by Molly’s upcoming affair, so every glimpse of Boylan is torturous. This isn’t articulated as such, but Scott Shepherd has created an idiosyncratic walk for that character, arresting your eye and prompting a chuckle.

Bloom himself is no model of purity. He has advertised for a secretary, using a phony name, and has become obsessed with Martha Clifford, one of the respondents. He sells ads for a Dublin newspaper, and we see him at the office where he just can’t seem to fit in with the others. He’s at his best, it seems, at the pub, although even there, in the episode titled “Sirens,” the temptations of the barmaids are torturous. It’s there that one of those barmaids, Miss Douce, raises her skirt high enough to display a garter, which she lasciviously snaps against her thigh, even as Handel’s “See the conquering hero” sounds in the background.

A determined reader can finish “Ulysses” in under 15 hours; an audiobook runs over 40. The ERS production compresses the story into two and a half hours, which teases out the dramatic arcs that inform the novel.

Maggie Hoffman as Molly
Photo by Maria Baranova

Bloom and Dedalus meet in Nighttown, Dublin’s vice district, where a visit to Bella Cohen’s brothel becomes the scenes of hallucinations suffered by the two. Now that we’re accustomed to the discursive nature of the text, and, therefore, this play, we’re not surprised. Confused, yes, but that’s an important part of this experience.

Note a convention used throughout, but especially towards the end, of doubling lines, such that a character’s dialogue is simultaneously echoed by a narrator. It calls attention to particular moments that serve as anchors. Bloom, for example, in Episode 8, is in search of a meal, but reacts with disgust as he watches others chowing down in a restaurant. Some of his thoughts on the matter get this echo treatment, underlining the whirl of emotions he’s experiencing.

Again in the final episode, Molly’s unpunctuated monologue (judiciously pruned) gets some doubling, mostly on the key word “yes.” It’s Maggie Hoffman, fully inhabiting the character, sitting in bed, expertly articulating the flow of Molly’s thoughts, replete with her feisty recollections of sex and annoyance with men, and nature, and mortality. And eventually other members of the cast grab lines here and there, accelerating the energy of the scene without altering its tempo, leading us to that final, famous “yes.”

It’s another success for this company, perhaps its most audacious. It’s an excellent introduction to the book, although it can be argued that reading the book itself serves only as an introduction to the book. Trying to wrench an easy-to-follow narrative out of “Ulysses” would be to destroy it, so kudos to Elevator Repair Service for preserving its impenetrable wonder. It’s a brilliant production.

Ulysses
Adapted from the novel by James Joyce
Presented by Elevator Repair Service
Directed by John Collins and Scott Shepherd
Luma Theater, Bard College, June 23