Elevator Repair Service — the troupe best known for its eight-hour, word-for-word staged reading of The Great Gatsby — has decided to tackle another 20th-century literary classic: James Joyce’s Ulysses. Thankfully, the team (led by co-directors John Collins and Scott Shepherd) has taken the scissors to the Irish master’s 260,000-word modernist masterpiece — which is frequently read aloud in 24-hour marathons on the June 16 “Bloomsday” when the action takes place. What we now get is a 2 hour, 45 minute CliffsNotes version of the text, with snippets from all 18 chapters — including the perversely absurdist ones that abandon any grip on realism for more imaginative, experimental territory.
We also get familiar ERS-style theatrics, including an initially drab office setting (designed by the collective dots) with a long conference table where the cast of seven initially sits and recites from a TelePrompter behind the audience, and a giant upstage clock that marks the 18-hour trajectory of the Dubliners in the story. The production signals the hundreds of text edits with the screeching sound of an audiotape on fast forward or a jump-cut sound effect in a video game (sound by Ben Jalosa Williams) as well as the actors miming a sudden gust of wind that has blown from their perches in the timeline.
Unlike Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Ulysses is a much more challenging text to wrangle, for readers and theatermakers alike. As Shepherd notes when he steps out of his various supporting roles to act as a kind of narrator/commentator, “every reading of Ulysses is a misreading.” The novel is a modern gloss on Homer’s Odyssey, a satire of Irish intellectuals at the turn of the 20th century, an exposé of antisemitism, an exercise in experimentation full of wordplay and puns and unreliable narrators, and a character study of a middle-aged couple whose bawdy sexuality is not restricted to each other. And a few other things besides.
There are moments when ERS’s adaptation takes flight, from the tossing of pages into the air to the birth of octuplets who emerge as dolls from beneath a character’s skirt and are tossed by Shepherd over-shoulder to a waiting nurse. Vin Knight is terrific as Leopold Bloom, who endures a day full of slights due to his opera singer wife Molly’s infidelity and his status as a rare Jew in Dublin. And he’s matched by a cast that sinks into a variety of roles while also swapping narration duties.
But there’s a good deal of repetition here — all those fast-forwards can get wearying over time — as well as understandable if ill-advised attempts to lean into all of the many qualities of the original. We get a few scenes of a projected Dublin street map, because Ulysses also works as a kind of walking tour of Ireland’s capital circa 1904. We also get extended riffs of poetry and borderline gibberish to represent Joyce’s forays into modernism. And then Maggie Hoffman delivers Molly’s final monologue pretty much verbatim, a masturbatory riff on womanhood that retains its power (and its power to shock) after a century. Curiously, Hoffman delivers her final “yes” with epic deflation and not the coital climax that you might expect.
Fans of Joyce will find much to savor here, and much to dissect. Newbies can get lost in the rhythms of the author’s language as well as the trickiness of the plot, which tends to drag in the overlong first act. (It pays to arrive early enough to download the plot synopsis produced for the show and shared via QR code outside the theater.) But this feels more like gloss than adaptation, an exercise that captures elements of the source material without ever standing on its own terms. ★★★☆☆
ULYSSES
Public Theater, Off Broadway
Running time: 2 hours, 45 minutes (with 1 intermission)
Tickets on sale through March 1 for $109 to $185
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