James Joyce’s novel Ulysses got traction right out of the gate because people thought it was a dirty book. It was banned in Great Britain and the United States upon publication in 1922. Actually, U.S. officials were so eager to censor the book that they deemed it obscene a year before it was published, basing their decision on excerpts published in literary magazines.
So, until 1934, when the U.S. deemed the book not obscene, and 1936, when it was at last published in Great Britain, Ulysses was a book that people were dying to read, precisely because they couldn’t.
Once people did get their hands on Joyce’s novel, things changed. It was read not because it was dirty (it wasn’t; frank, yes, about previously taboo subjects like adultery, masturbation, or defecation; but not dirty) but because it was hailed as a masterpiece (it was).
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The problem with masterpieces, especially 20th-century masterpieces, is that they are often, erm, shall we say, less than accessible, e.g., The Rite of Spring, The Sound and the Fury, The Waste Land, all of Proust, nearly all of abstract expressionism.
There’s no denying Ulysses falls into this category. It is not always easy reading. But you don’t need a sherpa to help you get through it. You don’t even need a Ph.D. It’s not just a goddamn chore. Sad to say, that’s how most people think of it, as a book to be studied more than merely read, and certainly never to be read for fun.
Which brings me to the Elevator Repair Service’s production of Ulysses, running through July 14 at the Fisher Center as part of Bard College’s Summerscape arts programming.
It worried me to discover that on Summerscape’s website there are recommendations for, as profs say in their syllabi, “further study.” There was a guide to Ulysses, and there were refreshers on The Odyssey and Hamlet. Seeing all that, I groaned, fearful that academic funsuckers were all too eager to replace pleasure with pedantry.
I was wrong. The production that greeted me at Bard was almost pure pleasure. There was nothing eat-your-spinach about it.
It begins as a table reading, with the actors arrayed along three tables pushed together. They sit on a bare stage, facing the audience with their scripts before them and a clock on the wall behind them, and off we go.
In no time the orderliness of the table reading is upended. Characters get up and start moving around, pairing off in twos and threes, then changing guises as the seven players in the cast adopt multiple roles over the course of the story. Then, slowly at first, and then all at once, chaos creeps in.
By the time Leopold Bloom, an unassuming ad broker, fixes his wife Molly breakfast in bed, goes off to a funeral, and then visits the newspaper office, aka the Cave of the Winds, things have begun to unravel. The scripts that began as neat piles before each actor at the table are now scattered everywhere. By the time Bloom eats lunch, a piggish rout breaks out in the restaurant, discarded condiment bottles crowd the floor with the previously discarded scripts, cast-off newspaper headlines, and Lord knows what else.
The basic plot of Ulysses is famously mundane: Bloom spends a day and part of a night on June 16, 1904, walking about Dublin in the course of doing his job, ultimately encountering at end of day a very drunk young Stephen Dedalus (Joyce’s alter ago), whom he rescues from a brothel and sobers up.
Even if you didn’t suspect that each chapter of Ulysses corresponds to an episode in Homer’s Odyssey, even if you missed a shovelful of the intricacies Joyce embedded in his novel, you can still relish spending the day with its outwardly unremarkable but seductively likable central character: We know so much about Leopold Bloom by story’s end that it’s hard to believe he’s not real.
Joyce builds his portrait through hundreds of details, some important (Bloom is a Jew), some not so much (Bloom dresses to the right), but they all point to Bloom’s alienation and outsider status. The Elevator Repair Service, famous for tackling whole literary works at one go, does not have the luxury of time or space to recreate Bloom’s day at leisure, but it gives us the essentials in ways as clever as they are economical: Bloom, wonderfully embued with a sort of fumbling nobility by Vin Knight, is soberly attired in jacket, waistcoat, and bowler hat from the neck up, but from the waist down he’s clad in a skirt. So as soon as he stands up near the beginning of the table reading, we see his otherness right off.
Lights, music, physical action—all contribute to the cause: One might write a whole essay on how director John Collins and his cast use the ways various characters walk to tell their stories.
Elevator Repair Service is most famous for its gorgeous eight-hour dramatization of The Great Gatsby, which drops not a syllable from the book in the telling.
Ulysses, which is probably four or five times as long as Gatsby, is a more daunting undertaking. A lot of the text has been cut. But every scene has been crammed in, one way or another, which makes for a kind of “If it’s Tuesday this must be Belgium” sort of tour of Joyce’s domain. Episodes erupt and vanish before you can barely grasp what’s happening, and the second act, with the already surreal Nighttown section at its heart, is so chaotic that it’s often impossible to thrash out what’s happening on stage, even if you’ve read the book.
Ironically some of the play’s most moving moments are its quietest. Bloom and Dedalus in the cabman’s shelter near the end, and the Q&A format that Joyce uses to narrate Bloom’s journey to bed and sleep. Maybe it’s because there’s little or no literary showmanship to decipher in these still moments, but for whatever reason, here is where we see most clearly the humanity of these people.
It is worth remembering that one of Joyce’s earliest and strongest influences was the naturalistic playwright Henrik Ibsen. And Joyce, while far less conventional than Ibsen, was just as concerned with character and how to bring it alive in words. In all our talk and theorizing about this often maddeningly complex novel, we often lose sight of its humanity and its humor. Elevator Repair Service puts both those things front and center.
Is their rendition a success? A qualified yes. Sometimes too much is squeezed into too small a space and we just get lost. But the novel is a book to get lost in and a book to reread, and maybe the same should be said for this production: once is not enough.
Almost certainly this play will send readers back to the book, partly out of curiosity to see how what’s on the page inspired what landed on stage, and partly because Elevator Repair has reminded us so forcefully that Ulysses is not a chore, not a literary folly, and certainly no mere bloodless academic exercise.
This play has a wonderfully strong pulse.
