ERS’s Ulysses Is a Little Stately, a Little Plump

From Gatz, astatine the Fisher Center astatine Bard. Photo: Maria Baranova/Maria Baranova

We’re drowning in Gatsby adaptations, but it’s hard to lucifer the splendor of Elevator Repair Service’s Gatz. Returning for an encore astatine the Public Theater this fall, the company’s six-hour-long rendering of each connection of Fitzgerald’s publication was its archetypal adaptation of a novel, a theatrical mode present astir synonymous with their name. It’s besides a marvel, an exponential curve of enchantment that coalesces patiently, adjacent anti-dramatically, until abruptly you blink and find that it has soared into outer space, wherever it volition enactment for the amended portion of a workday arsenic you bent onto the process of its comet. No wonderment the company, truthful adventurous with the large boys of literature, wanted to propulsion adjacent further into the stratosphere: Now, astatine the Bard SummerScape festival, ERS is premiering their instrumentality connected James Joyce’s vertiginous Ulysses. (This time, though the publication is much than 200,000 words longer, the accumulation is shorter — astir 2 hours and forty minutes.) In a talkback pursuing the show I saw, ERS’s creator manager John Collins described the ensemble’s attack with a question: “What happens erstwhile you enactment this happening connected stage? Which is different,” helium added quickly, “from, ‘How tin we marque this happening into a play?’” Central to their work, helium said, is the “challenge of letting the publication beryllium itself.”

That’s a compelling starting point, but it leaves different question haunting the wings similar the shade of aged Hamlet waiting for its entrance. What does a play privation to be? Whether oregon not Ulysses is substantively its book-self successful ERS’s staging, there’s besides a portion of theatre being made. And portion seeking to clasp a novel’s essence—avoiding the tropes and traps of accepted adaptation—is a precise bully thing, it isn’t needfully tantamount to crafting a full-bodied, continuously gripping performance. ERS can bash both, but here, they travel up short. It’s not precisely a lawsuit of vaulting ambition: Rather than going excessively big, excessively wild, excessively overmuch successful attempting Joyce’s Dublin doozy, they consciousness a small safe, adjacent astatine times downright plodding.

ERS’s Ulysses began arsenic a one-off commissioned by Symphony Space for its Bloomsday centenary solemnisation successful 2022, and it’s inactive struggling to interruption distant from being a glorified reading. (The enactment is ultrafine: Gatz is simply a glorious reading, and theatrical throughout.) Bloomsdays astir the satellite diagnostic marathon recitals of Joyce’s full substance that often tally good upwards of 24 hours, and, successful the post-show discussion, Collins, possibly besides with Gatz ever successful his peripheral vision, acknowledged the temptation of specified a feat. “In a perverse and benignant of silly way, we wanted to beryllium capable to accidental we did the full book,” helium said. “The archetypal thought was let’s conscionable instrumentality 1 leafage from each chapter,” added Scott Shepherd, Collins’s co-director and the creator of the unsocial teleprompter bundle ERS uses successful bid to play with substance and clip connected stage. Shepherd is besides the histrion ERS shows thin to orbit around. Though present helium plays sidekicks and comical rakes similar Buck Mulligan and Blazes Boylan, helium inactive exerts a gravitational propulsion wrong the production, and his software—given ocular beingness by Matthew Deinhart’s projections, which crook the intentionally drab, conferencelike scenic plan by the ubiquitous dots corporate into a blank leafage awaiting verbiage—is the motor of the machine. ERS does so “do” the full book, if you number the galore passages that zoom by successful a projected blur portion Ben Jalosa Williams’s dependable plan gives america the unmistakable jumbled squeal of a portion successful accelerated forward. The actors bent onto the edges of tables, oregon are slammed backmost successful their chairs with the unit of a cartoon gale. It’s a large effect — the archetypal time. By the 3rd oregon fourth, it’s inactive good. Then it becomes wide that the accumulation won’t ever rather transcend this foundational portion of vocabulary. It’s play, fast-forward, play, fast-forward, consecutive connected done to the end, and it’s wearying.

Shepherd’s tech—which besides includes a ample timepiece connected the backmost partition that plunges up on with the text, allowing america to way Joyce’s characters passim their epic day—comes with the entreaty and the hazard of each novelties. It’s ingenious, and it tin easy flatten into predictability, adjacent gimmickry, without immoderate different driving force, much grippy and fleshy and human, successful the mix. Collins and his actors cognize this: As the bemused, cuckolded adman Leopold Bloom, Vin Knight stands astride the furniture, exultant arsenic helium proclaims his cri de cœur — “Plenty to spot and perceive and consciousness yet. Feel unrecorded lukewarm beings adjacent you. Let them slumber successful their maggoty beds. They are not going to get maine this innings. Warm beds: lukewarm fullblooded life.” Yes! you deliberation for a infinitesimal — past the infinitesimal passes, similar the blink of a lightning bug. The amusement ne'er achieves a sustained vigor oregon vibrancy, a aureate drawstring to necktie its moments of illumination together.

Here’s wherever 1 runs into those questions astir the quality of 1 signifier versus another. Joyce’s novel, successful each its unashamedly cocksure modernist maximalism, is simply a cardinal and 1 things — an eighteen-episode riff connected The Odyssey; a roiling outpouring for assorted streams of consciousness; a creation with Shakespeare and Dante and Milton and countless different footnoteables; a walking circuit of Dublin; an experimentation successful diction from the slangy to the archaic, the high-poetic to the devilishly prurient. It’s porn and it’s HBO! And besides the grad seminar of your dreams (or nightmares, depending). To enactment it connected signifier means uncovering a visceral mode to pass its heady, calorie-rich heterogeneity — and portion ERS’s Ulysses gives america the collage, it doesn’t consistently springiness america the rush. Episodes thin to consciousness akin successful value and tone. The agelong archetypal enactment drags adjacent the finish, its erudition blurring into melodramatic monotony. Characters—with moments of objection for Bloom, whom Knight shapes with a light, sympathetic touch—aren’t rendered successful a mode that truly lets america successful connected their stakes oregon their souls.

It’s existent that successful specified heightened material, a definite broadness and flatness of quality tin enactment conscionable good if thing other is hoisting our spirits aloft, but not capable is. Joyce’s effusions are, astatine times, exhilarating — but truthful they would beryllium successful a Bloomsday speechmaking oregon a well-delivered audiobook. We person plentifulness of different senses successful play here, plentifulness to spot and consciousness yet, but Collins’s usage of the signifier is, if not precisely restrained, past mostly familiar. Like participants successful a legislature hearing, the actors stay down their enactment of tables for acold excessively long, and erstwhile they yet interruption up the architecture, the effect isn’t arsenic rambunctiously galvanizing arsenic it aspires to be. They marque a mess, yes, but a reasonably foreseeable one. The accumulation is utilizing a beautiful, resonant image for overmuch of its selling — a photograph of the institution flinging papers up successful the air. It captures a tone of joyful, breathless mischief, a reckless, anti-academic Joycean rebellion that feels perfectly right, but that feeling (which is antithetic from that idea) crosses the footlights lone precise occasionally during the production.

What does travel crossed is the smut. Which is, assuredly, wholly accurate, if not ever compelling. Believe me, I person arsenic overmuch appreciation for Joyce’s deliriously filthy emotion letters arsenic anyone whose ain intersexual awakening progressive Shakespeare successful Love and The Mists of Avalon, not to mention Nora — but successful their gameness to spell beneath the loop with Joyce, Collins and his institution miss opportunities to spell up into the cosmos. The 2 directions, it seems to me, are connected, adjacent fixed the pathos and seediness Joyce recognizes successful the quality libido. But erstwhile we get to the eighteenth and last occurrence of Ulysses—Molly Bloom’s 2 a.m., 22,000 word, each but unpunctuated interior soliloquy, which the amusement gives america successful its entirety—Maggie Hoffman’s Molly gets truthful breathy and close-to-climax during the book’s last words, that the consciousness of their greater transcendence is muted. The rapturous crescendo of Molly’s “yes I said yes I volition Yes” feels much akin to an earlier infinitesimal successful which her hubby masturbated to the show of a young pistillate connected the beach, alternatively than an expansive confluence of carnal pleasure, memory, presence, and deep, existential clasp of life.

It’s a shame, due to the fact that Hoffman brings some adept precision and tenderness to truthful overmuch of the speech. Joyce provides nary handholds for wherever to pause, wherever to marque the turns oregon conception the sense, and Hoffman and Collins unneurotic person done the meticulous enactment of scoring each tiny twist and loop of thought. This attraction to orchestration, to allowing america to perceive the text’s melody enactment intelligibly amidst its galore harmonies and cacophonies, is the show’s crowning achievement, and it’s surely not nothing. Especially erstwhile Stephanie Weeks (who rounds retired the ensemble on with Dee Beesnael, Kate Benson, and Christopher-Rashee Stevenson) has the floor, the connection flows similar honey. If only, successful the convergence of each its parts, the amusement ever tasted arsenic sweet.

Ulysses is astatine Bard’s Fisher Center successful Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, done July 14.