Flying Off the Page, ‘Ulysses’ Lands on Its Feet – The Village Voice

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You can’t adapt James Joyce’s Ulysses for the stage, not the whole thing anyway. It’s too long, it’s too difficult, and it’s too plotless. Nothing really happens. Not enough people in the audience are likely to have actually read it and therefore be able to enjoy any Easter eggs, or delight in clever translations from page to stage. And really, Ulysses, serialized from 1918 to 1921 and published in one volume in 1922, is famously a novel of the interior life of its characters. Stream of consciousness, they called it, or interior monologue — in French, monologue intérieur. (Joyce, influenced by 19-century novelist and playwright Édouard Dujardin, preferred the latter.) Moreover, in Ulysses, character consciousness interweaves with third person narration so subtly — sometimes alternating within a paragraph, sometimes within a sentence — that it makes no sense to try to adapt it for theater. 

Here to rebut these objections is Elevator Repair Service’s Ulysses, currently at the Fisher Center of Bard College through July 14. The theater ensemble’s answer is something like, Well sure, but like Mount Everest, it’s there. Director John Collins remarks, “‘Why would you ever do this?’ was a great reason to do it.” And hey, they seem to be saying, let’s try and have some damned fun going about it. They have the cred, having mounted Gatz (2010), an 8-hour unexpurgated Great Gatsby, to real acclaim. This time, cuts to the 700-plus-page novel were necessary, but ERS stays true to Joyce’s language, incorporating parts of all 18 chapters of Ulysses verbatim, and of course not adding a word of their own. The Herculean attempt itself could be considered a triumph, but, it turns out, so is the production. Directed by Collins with co-direction by Scott Shepherd, who excerpted the novel to create a script, ERS’s Ulysses adroitly compresses Joyce’s narrative  into two and a half hours of drama, pathos, and humor, a sometimes thoughtful and often madcap adaptation that captures the rhythms and spirit of the novel, without being afraid to have fun with it.

The musical borrowing is just the sort of esoterica that Joyce scatters throughout his novel.

As Ulysses begins, the ensemble cast sits at a table, pens in hand and pages piled before them, as if they are reading their scripts, taking notes on their scripts, or even, perhaps, writing their scripts. Paper, at first docile and neat, will soon start to fly through the space, until the stage is strewn with it. The message is clear: Text has its own agency, but so do the actors; this will be a collaboration of text and reader, reader and performer. Cast members play multiple roles, leading to memorable turns. Stephanie Weeks offers up a humorous rendition of the very small part of Martha Clifford, as she voices her letter to Leopold Bloom. Weeks makes malapropism erotic: “I called you naughty boy because I do not like that other world,” and then turns childlike: “Please tell me what is the real meaning of that word?” Protagonist Leopold Bloom is played with convincing sincerity and occasional goofiness by Vin Knight, though the decision to make Bloom mustacheless is bold and was unnerving to one audience member I overheard. Maggie Hoffman’s take on Molly Bloom smartly vacillates between sassy — stretching her legs while saying, “I bet he never saw a better pair of thighs” — and pensive — “I don’t care what anybody says, it’d be much better for the world to be governed by the women” — with many stops along the way. With the aid of other cast members, who chime in with sound effects and a chorus of the famously repeated “Yes,” Hoffman avoids turning the character into the stereotype featured at many a Bloomsday performance. 

The cast takes turns voicing Joyce’s narrator, really, narrators, who achieve a kind of parity with the characters, all bodies that spew words. In this way, rather than skirting the problem of Joyce’s narrative play, Ulysses embraces it. At times, narrator and character speak in unison, such as when Stephen Dedalus, Joyce’s semi-autobiographical stand-in, muses about money as “symbols soiled by greed and misery” — a device that suits Joyce’s polyvocal style. The production offers large swaths of the novel and signals the bypassing of — no, the accelerating past — sections of text with the screechy whirr of analog tape fast-forwarding, as the actors’ torsos are whiplashed backward, time being rendered as motion, motion being rendered as sound. Recorded sound, throughout, exquisitely augments the script, adding detail: the creak of carriage springs in a funeral procession, the crash of surf as Stephen walks along the shore, the clank of restaurant dishes. The players are given their own theme music, a nod to the novel’s “Sirens” chapter, which uses recurring motifs to introduce characters. The song choices are as obvious as “Love’s Old Sweet Song,” for Leopold Bloom, and as eccentric as the jazzy, jaunty instrumental sampled from Kurosawa’s High and Low that accompanies Blazes Boylan, played by Shepherd as the caricature he should be. The musical borrowing is just the sort of esoterica that Joyce scatters throughout his novel.

The table at the center of the action becomes a surface on which to eat, drink, work, teach, spit, conduct business, lie abed. It is danced upon by hands, bodies, and objects, a stage of its own within the larger stage, where Ulysses is revealed as a story full of plot, full of things that happen. Around that table the actors stand or sit as they dive into the sea, attend a funeral, watch fireworks, jerk off, argue about politics, and give birth (as Bloom does, hilariously, to a litter of toy babies). As the chaotic second act unfolds, the table splits into thirds to match the novel’s three parts, three main characters. Behind one section, Boylan and Molly Bloom go at it while Leopold watches with (self-)pleasure. In the space between table sections, Stephen Dedalus, played as haughty and haunted by Christopher-Rashee Stevenson, is visited by the ghost of his mother, whom he tries to strike down with his cane. 

Throughout, a clock on the back wall of the stage tells each scene’s hour, guiding the audience through this particular take on Bloomsday — June 16, 1904, in Dublin. The production, though replicating much of the density and obscurity of the novel, has no wish to baffle newcomers to Joyce. Rather, it plays upon the book’s pleasures. Ulysses has been adapted for the stage before, most notably, for New York theater enthusiasts, in Marjorie Barkentin’s 1958 Off-Broadway production, Ulysses in Nighttown. Based on the novel’s “Circe” chapter, it was brought to Broadway in 1974, and starred Zero Mostel in both productions. (Also likely to raise eyebrows was the involvement in the first production of Carroll O’Connor, and in the second, Tommy Lee Jones.) 

The ERS Ulysses can now proudly stand alongside that production as a heroic achievement, surpassing it in ambition by bringing the entire damned novel to life.  ❖

Elevator Repair Service: Ulysses
Fisher Center, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson
Through July 14

Jonathan Goldman is a professor in the Department of Humanities, New York Institute of Technology; author of Modernism Is the Literature of Celebrity; director of the website New York 1920s: 100 Years Ago Today, When We Became Modern; and president of the James Joyce Society.

The post Flying Off the Page, ‘Ulysses’ Lands on Its Feet appeared first on The Village Voice.

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R.C. Baker

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