Ever since their breakthrough adaptation of The Great Gatsby in 2005, Elevator Repair Service has maintained critical admiration for their unconventional stagings of early 20th century literature. In Gatz, ERS makes the audacious choice to speak every single word of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel, resulting in a riveting 7+ hour evening of theater. While their peers in the performing arts were eliminating intermissions to combat audiences’ (supposedly) shrinking attention-spans, ERS moved in the opposite direction, making live performance that continues to experiment with what is possible within the form itself.
In their subsequent literary interpretations, ERS´ director John Collins has adapted novels by Hemingway and Faulkner into theater. A heightened use of spoken language remains central to their work, an increasingly radical move in a theatrical landscape glutted with multimedia, cross-disciplinary, or mixed-reality performances for screen-addicted audiences. Refusing to stay safe and run with the rest of the pack, ERS´ latest project at the Public chooses to mine a literary source that is about as gargantuan as it gets.
Ulysses is not for the faint of heart. Packed with countless allusions to mythology, Irish history, and other works of literature, the novel, from 1922, contains a variety of prose styles and a number of passages in other languages (Joyce was fluent in six languages, and at least partially proficient in another ten). Many assert that James Joyce’s Ulysses is “the greatest novel ever written,” while just as many find the 700+ page tome impenetrable and bewildering.
Over the years, there have been many theatrical and cinematic attempts to adapt– in both whole and part– the book. Because Ulysses is a book where “nothing much happens, and yet everything happens” (to paraphrase writer Anne Enright), some interpreters choose to concentrate on a single passage of the book, such The “Nighttown” episode from Chapter 15 written in the form of a playscript. Other adaptors have opted to focus on the book´s simple plot of marital infidelity between protagonist Leopold Bloom and his wife, Molly. None of these approaches have fulfilled the true pleasures to be derived from the book: its overwhelming celebration of language itself. In Joyce´s literary odyssey, the word is the true hero, the one that undergoes so many adventures over the course of its eighteen dense chapters. How, then, to adapt it into a play? Is the only way to get the “complete” Joycean experience to go to Dublin on Bloomsday (June 16, the day during which the novel takes place–on top of everything else, the book of “Ulysses” is chronometrically precise), and join the hundreds of others who are reading aloud and retracing the characters´ footsteps in real-time?
For ERS’ production of Ulysses, Collins and co-director Scott Shepard (who also performs in this production) strip-down the artifice as much as possible, letting Joyce’s language do most of the work. The current two-plus hour production originated from a showing Collins & Co. did in 2022 at Symphony Space’s Bloomsday Event, celebrating the centenary of the book´s publication. The seven actors (Dee Beasnael, Kate Benson, Maggie Hoffman, Vin Knight, Christopher-Rashee Stevenson, and Stephanie Weeks, in addition to Shepard) play about forty characters, sometimes changing with the addition or the removal of a hat, a cane, or a scarf. Often, the ensemble recites passages from the book while seated facing us, allowing Joyce’s linguistic pyrotechnics to fill the room. Onstage, these actors play with zeal.
This Ulysses emphasizes the joy that can be had in the theater, and how much pleasure can be created with spoken language.
ERS wisely keeps a lot of the zaniness of the text while keeping the skeleton of the narrative intact; newcomers as well as Joyceans will find a lot to enjoy. Collins’ collaborators make this complex literature decipherable, to varying degrees of mastery.
Shepard is delightfully weird in his physicality as Blazes Boylan–Molly’s manager and paramour– as he jauntily strolls through the streets for his rendezvous with Leopold´s wife. The simplicity of Shepard’s delivery is particularly poignant during the penultimate “Ithaca” episode, spoken like a catechism. Weeks steals the scenes when she becomes the hilariously horny Martha, with whom Bloom (Knight) is exchanging racy letters. Weeks’ great command of language is particularly evident during the opening “Telemachus” episode. Stevenson, whose interpretation of Stephen Dedalus is both dignified and morose, gets to show some whimsy when playing a cat.
Patricia Marjorie provides the cast with a seemingly bottomless well of props to signal a change of character or location, from hats and pulp paperback novels to food, pints, and about a dozen baby dolls. Matthew Deinhart also supports Ulysses by projecting images of a clock, maps of Dublin, and passages from the novel. Each design element is unobtrusive, instead subtly enhancing the skills of the actors.
The second half of Ulysses, as the book’s episodes got more surreal, feels a bit breathless. It felt as if ERS wanted to sprint to Molly’s famous steam-of-conscious monologue at the end (the text’s sensuality played matter-of-fact by Hoffman). But this observation could be a matter of personal taste, a minor quibble from a Joyce fan.
Photo by Joan Marcus.
Leave a Reply