This piece shows the fun of James Joyce’s mighty “Ulysses”

James Joyce’s novel Ulysses gained immediate traction because people thought it was a dirty book. It was banned in Britain and the United States after its publication in 1922. In fact, U.S. authorities were so eager to censor the book that they considered it obscene. one year ago The decision was made on the basis of excerpts printed in literary magazines.

Until 1934, when the US declared the book not obscene, and 1936, when it was finally published in Great Britain, Ulysses was a book that people wanted to read precisely because they couldn’t.

When people got their hands on Joyce’s novel, everything changed. It was read not because it was offensive (which it wasn’t; it dealt openly and frankly with previously taboo subjects like adultery, masturbation, and defecation, but not in an offensive way), but because it was hailed as a masterpiece (which it was).

The problem with masterpieces, especially masterpieces of the 20th century, is that they are often, er, let’s say, not exactly accessible, for example The Rite of Spring, Sound and Madness, The Waste Landeverything by Proust, almost all of abstract expressionism.

It can not be denied Ulysses falls into that category. It’s not always an easy read. But you don’t need a sherpa to help you with it. You don’t even need a PhD. It’s not just a damn chore. Sadly, that’s how most people think of it, as a book to be studied rather than read, and certainly never read for pleasure.

This brings me to the production of the elevator repair service of Ulyssesruns through July 14 at the Fisher Center as part of Bard College’s Summerscape arts program.

I was disturbed when I discovered that on the Summerscape website there were recommendations for what the professors say in their syllabi as “further studies.” There was a guide for Ulyssesand there were refreshments on The Odyssey And hamlet. When I saw all this, I groaned, afraid that academic jokers would be only too willing to replace pleasure with pedantry.

I was wrong. The production that greeted me at Bard was almost pure pleasure. There was nothing about it that made me want to eat spinach.

It begins with a table reading, where the actors sit at three tables pushed together. They sit on an empty stage, facing the audience, with their texts in front of them and a clock on the wall behind them, and off they go.

In an instant, the order of the table reading is turned on its head. The characters stand up and begin to move in twos or threes, then change shape as the seven actors take on multiple roles throughout the story. Then, slowly at first and then all at once, chaos creeps in.

When Leopold Bloom, a nondescript advertising agent, brings his wife Molly breakfast in bed, heads to a funeral, and then visits the newspaper office, also known as the Cave of the Winds, things start to unravel. The scripts that were initially laid out neatly on the table in front of each actor are now scattered everywhere. As Bloom eats lunch, the restaurant erupts into a mess, discarded condiment bottles crowd the floor, along with the previously discarded scripts, discarded newspaper headlines, and God knows what else.

The basic plot of Ulysses is, as we know, banal: On June 16, 1904, Bloom spends a day and part of a night walking through Dublin as part of his work, and at the end of the day meets the very drunk young Stephen Dedalus (Joyce’s alter ego), whom he rescues from a brothel and sobers up.

Even if you didn’t suspect that each chapter of Ulysses is an episode from Homer’s OdysseyEven if you missed many of the subtleties Joyce incorporated into his novel, you can still enjoy spending the day with the outwardly unremarkable but seductively likable main character: By the end of the story, we know so much about Leopold Bloom that it’s hard to believe he’s not real.

Joyce builds his portrait through hundreds of details, some important (Bloom is Jewish), some less so (Bloom dresses to the right), but all of them point to Bloom’s alienation and outsider status. The Elevator Repair Service, known for tackling entire literary works at once, doesn’t have the luxury of time or space to leisurely recreate Bloom’s day, but it gives us the gist in a way that’s both clever and economical: Bloom, wonderfully given a kind of awkward nobility by Vin Knight, is dressed simply from the neck up, in a jacket, waistcoat, and bowler hat, but in a skirt from the waist down. So as soon as he stands up at the start of the table reading, we see his otherness immediately.

Lighting, music, physical activity – everything contributes to the result: one could write an entire essay on how director John Collins and his cast use the gaits of the various characters to tell their stories.

Elevator Repair Service is best known for its beautiful eight-hour production of The Great Gatsbywho doesn’t leave out a single syllable from the book when telling the story.

Ulysseswhich is probably four to five times as long as Gatsbyis a more ambitious undertaking. Much of the text has been cut. But every scene has been crammed in in some way or another, making for a sort of “if today is Tuesday, this must be Belgium” tour of Joyce’s realm. Episodes erupt and disappear before you can even comprehend what is happening, and the second act, centered on the already surreal Nighttown section, is so chaotic that it is often impossible to figure out what is happening on stage, even if you have read the book.

Ironically, some of the play’s most moving moments are its quietest. Bloom and Dedalus in the taxi driver’s shelter near the end, and the question-and-answer format Joyce uses to portray Bloom’s journey to bed and sleep. Perhaps it’s because there’s little or no literary show to decipher in these quiet moments, but whatever the reason, it’s here that we see the humanity of these people most clearly.

It’s worth remembering that one of Joyce’s earliest and strongest influences was the naturalist playwright Henrik Ibsen. And while Joyce was far less conventional than Ibsen, he was just as interested in characters and how to bring them to life in words. In all our conversations and theories about this often insanely complex novel, we often lose sight of its humanity and humor. Elevator Repair Service puts both of these things front and center.

Was their interpretation successful? A qualified yes. Sometimes too much is squeezed into too little space and we simply lose ourselves. But the novel is a book that you can lose yourself in and read again and again, and perhaps the same should be said about this production: once is not enough.

Almost certainly, this piece will make readers return to the book, partly out of curiosity to learn how what is on the page inspired what ended up on the stage, and partly because Elevator Repair reminded us so forcefully that Ulysses is not a chore, not a literary folly, and certainly not a mere sober academic exercise.

This piece has a wonderfully strong pulse.