Off-B'way Review: Ulysses

The company of Ulysses.
Credit: Joan Marcus

The innovative theater collective Elevator Repair Service has tackled such literary giants as Fitzgerald (Gatz, its day-long version of The Great Gatsby), Faulkner (The Sound and the Fury) and Hemingway (The Sun Also Rises). The 35-year-old company is now taking on the greatest challenge in its history by brining to the stage what is generally regarded as one of the most confounding literary masterpieces, James Joyce’ Ulysses. The 1922 massive tome chronicles a single day—June 16, 1904—in Dublin, following the wanderings of Leopold Bloom, his wife Molly and the young Stephen Dedalus, paralleling Homer’s epic The Odyssey. Joyce experiments with style and form, switches genres with each chapter and has the characters express their inner thoughts. We are told in an onstage intro that one critic famously said that not much happens in Ulysses, apart from everything you can possibly imagine. 

Is it even possible to stage such a work which relies so heavily on interior monologues and so little on plot in theatrical terms? Burgess Meredith directed an adaptation of the phantasmagoric Nightgown section (Bloom venturing into Dublin’s red-light district and his own imagination) Off-Broadway in 1958 starring Zero Mostel which was revived on Broadway in 1974. Here director John Collins and co-director Scott Shepherd are taking on the work as a whole, or at least an edited version. While some of the sections are bogged down in attempts to dramatize Joyce’s literary excesses and tend to drag, this adaptation does capture the vital energy of the author’s vivid characters, his deep themes of sexuality, religion and literature, and the emergence of Dublin itself as a life force.    

Tivoli: A Short Story

We had found Tivoli the night before, searching for someplace to eat dinner before the opera in the next town to the south in the Hudson Valley area. The performance of the rarely-performed Oresteia by Taneyev was at a college campus as part of an arts festival (here's my review), but there were no nearby restaurants. So our weekend guest who was seeing the opera with us found a number of culinary choices on his Smartphone. We drove for maybe 20 minutes on Route 9G before the turnoff to the tiny town which contained a cluster of city-style eateries including the Japanese one we finally settled on, an avant-garde theater company, and a used-book store in what looked like a broken down old house.