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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.
