ERS’s Ulysses Is a Little Stately, a Little Plump
We’re drowning in Gatsby adaptations, but it’s hard to match the splendor of Elevator Repair Service’s Gatz. Returning for an encore at the Public Theater this fall, the company’s six-hour-long rendering of every word of Fitzgerald’s book was its first adaptation of a novel, a theatrical mode now almost synonymous with their name. It’s also a marvel, an exponential curve of enchantment that coalesces patiently, even anti-dramatically, until suddenly you blink and find that it has soared into outer space, where it will stay for the better part of a workday as you hang onto the tail of its comet. No wonder the company, so adventurous with the big boys of literature, wanted to push even further into the stratosphere: Now, at the Bard SummerScape festival, ERS is premiering their take on James Joyce’s vertiginous Ulysses. (This time, though the book is more than 200,000 words longer, the production is shorter — about two hours and forty minutes.) In a talkback following the performance I saw, ERS’s artistic director John Collins described the ensemble’s approach with a question: “What happens when you put this thing on stage? Which is different,” he added quickly, “from, ‘How can we make this thing into a play?’” Central to their work, he said, is the “challenge of letting the book be itself.”
That’s a compelling starting point, but it leaves another question haunting the wings like the ghost of old Hamlet waiting for its entrance. What does a play want to be? Whether or not Ulysses is substantively its book-self in ERS’s staging, there’s also a piece of theater being made. And while seeking to retain a novel’s essence—avoiding the tropes and traps of conventional adaptation—is a very good thing, it isn’t necessarily tantamount to crafting a full-bodied, continuously gripping performance. ERS can do both, but here, they come up short. It’s not exactly a case of vaulting ambition: Rather than going too big, too wild, too much in attempting Joyce’s Dublin doozy, they feel a little safe, even at times downright plodding.
ERS’s Ulysses began as a one-off commissioned by Symphony Space for its Bloomsday centenary celebration in 2022, and it’s still struggling to break away from being a glorified reading. (The line is ultrafine: Gatz is a glorious reading, and theatrical throughout.) Bloomsdays around the world feature marathon recitals of Joyce’s whole text that often run well upwards of 24 hours, and, in the post-show discussion, Collins, perhaps also with Gatz ever in his peripheral vision, acknowledged the temptation of such a feat. “In a perverse and sort of silly way, we wanted to be able to say we did the whole book,” he said. “The first idea was let’s just take one page from each chapter,” added Scott Shepherd, Collins’s co-director and the creator of the unique teleprompter software ERS uses in order to play with text and time on stage. Shepherd is also the actor ERS shows tend to orbit around. Though here he plays sidekicks and comical rakes like Buck Mulligan and Blazes Boylan, he still exerts a gravitational pull inside the production, and his software—given visual life by Matthew Deinhart’s projections, which turn the intentionally drab, conferencelike scenic design by the ubiquitous dots collective into a blank page awaiting verbiage—is the engine of the machine. ERS does indeed “do” the whole book, if you count the many passages that zoom by in a projected blur while Ben Jalosa Williams’s sound design gives us the unmistakable jumbled squeal of a tape in fast forward. The actors hang onto the edges of tables, or are slammed back in their chairs with the force of a cartoon gale. It’s a great effect — the first time. By the third or fourth, it’s still good. Then it becomes clear that the production won’t ever quite transcend this foundational piece of vocabulary. It’s play, fast-forward, play, fast-forward, straight on through to the end, and it’s wearying.
Shepherd’s tech—which also includes a large clock on the back wall that plunges ahead along with the text, allowing us to track Joyce’s characters throughout their epic day—comes with the appeal and the risk of all novelties. It’s ingenious, and it can easily flatten into predictability, even gimmickry, without some other driving force, more grippy and fleshy and human, in the mix. Collins and his actors know this: As the bemused, cuckolded adman Leopold Bloom, Vin Knight stands astride the furniture, exultant as he proclaims his cri de cœur — “Plenty to see and hear and feel yet. Feel live warm beings near you. Let them sleep in their maggoty beds. They are not going to get me this innings. Warm beds: warm fullblooded life.” Yes! you think for a moment — then the moment passes, like the blink of a lightning bug. The show never achieves a sustained energy or vibrancy, a golden string to tie its moments of illumination together.
Here’s where one runs into those questions about the nature of one form versus another. Joyce’s novel, in all its unashamedly cocksure modernist maximalism, is a million and one things — an eighteen-episode riff on The Odyssey; a roiling spring for various streams of consciousness; a dance with Shakespeare and Dante and Milton and countless other footnoteables; a walking tour of Dublin; an experiment in diction from the slangy to the archaic, the high-poetic to the devilishly prurient. It’s porn and it’s HBO! And also the grad seminar of your dreams (or nightmares, depending). To put it on stage means finding a visceral way to communicate its heady, calorie-rich heterogeneity — and while ERS’s Ulysses gives us the collage, it doesn’t consistently give us the rush. Episodes tend to feel similar in weight and tone. The long first act drags near the finish, its erudition blurring into dramatic monotony. Characters—with moments of exception for Bloom, whom Knight shapes with a light, sympathetic touch—aren’t rendered in a way that really lets us in on their stakes or their souls.
It’s true that in such heightened material, a certain broadness and flatness of character can work just fine if something else is hoisting our spirits aloft, but not enough is. Joyce’s effusions are, at times, exhilarating — but so they would be in a Bloomsday reading or a well-delivered audiobook. We have plenty of other senses in play here, plenty to see and feel yet, but Collins’s use of the stage is, if not exactly restrained, then largely familiar. Like participants in a congressional hearing, the actors remain behind their row of tables for far too long, and when they finally break up the architecture, the effect isn’t as rambunctiously galvanizing as it aspires to be. They make a mess, yes, but a fairly foreseeable one. The production is using a beautiful, resonant image for much of its marketing — a photograph of the company flinging papers up in the air. It captures a spirit of joyful, breathless mischief, a reckless, anti-academic Joycean rebellion that feels absolutely right, but that feeling (which is different from that idea) crosses the footlights only very occasionally during the production.
What does come across is the smut. Which is, assuredly, entirely accurate, if not always compelling. Believe me, I have as much appreciation for Joyce’s deliriously filthy love letters as anyone whose own sexual awakening involved Shakespeare in Love and The Mists of Avalon, not to mention Nora — but in their gameness to go below the belt with Joyce, Collins and his company miss opportunities to go up into the cosmos. The two directions, it seems to me, are connected, even given the pathos and seediness Joyce recognizes in the human libido. But when we get to the eighteenth and final episode of Ulysses—Molly Bloom’s 2 a.m., 22,000 word, all but unpunctuated internal soliloquy, which the show gives us in its entirety—Maggie Hoffman’s Molly gets so breathy and close-to-climax during the book’s final words, that the sense of their greater transcendence is muted. The rapturous crescendo of Molly’s “yes I said yes I will Yes” feels more akin to an earlier moment in which her husband masturbated to the sight of a young woman on the beach, rather than an expansive confluence of physical pleasure, memory, presence, and deep, existential embrace of life.
It’s a shame, because Hoffman brings both expert precision and tenderness to so much of the speech. Joyce provides no handholds for where to pause, where to make the turns or construct the sense, and Hoffman and Collins together have done the meticulous work of scoring every tiny twist and loop of thought. This attention to orchestration, to allowing us to hear the text’s melody line clearly amidst its many harmonies and cacophonies, is the show’s crowning achievement, and it’s certainly not nothing. Especially when Stephanie Weeks (who rounds out the ensemble along with Dee Beesnael, Kate Benson, and Christopher-Rashee Stevenson) has the floor, the language flows like honey. If only, in the convergence of all its parts, the show always tasted as sweet.
Ulysses is at Bard’s Fisher Center in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, through July 14.
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