Theater review: “Ulysses” by Elevator Repair Service

Out of Gatz, at the Fisher Center in Bard.
Photo: Maria Baranova/Maria Baranova

We are drowning in Gatsby Adjustments, but it is hard to beat the magnificence of Elevator Repair Service Gatz. The six-hour performance of every word of Fitzgerald’s book, which will be performed for an encore at the Public Theater this fall, was the troupe’s first novel adaptation, a theatrical form that has become almost synonymous with its name. It’s also a wonder, an exponential curve of enchantment that builds patiently, even antidramatically, until you suddenly blink and realize it has ascended into space, where it will remain for most of a workday while you cling to the tail of its comet. No wonder the troupe, so adventurous with literature’s big boys, wanted to go even further into the stratosphere: Now, at the Bard SummerScape Festival, ERS is presenting its take on James Joyce’s dizzying Ulysses. (Although the book this time is more than 200,000 words, the production is shorter—about two hours and forty minutes.) In a talkback session following the performance I saw, ERS artistic director John Collins described the ensemble’s approach with a question: “What happens when you put this thing on stage? That’s different,” he quickly added, “than ‘How can we make this a play?'” At the heart of their work, he said, is the “challenge of letting the book be itself.”

This is a convincing starting point, but there remains another question that haunts the wings like the ghost of old Hamlet waiting to make his entrance. What does a play want to be? Whether Ulysses is, in ERS’s production, its book self in terms of content, it is also a piece of theatre being made. And while trying to retain the essence of a novel – avoiding the tropes and pitfalls of a conventional adaptation – is a very good thing, it does not necessarily equate to creating a full-bodied, consistently engaging performance. ERS may do both, but here they fall short. It’s not exactly a case of over-ambition: instead of being too big, too wild, trying too hard to copy Joyce’s Dublin blockbusters, they feel a little safe, sometimes even downright ponderous.

ERS Ulysses began as a one-off commission by Symphony Space for its Bloomsday anniversary celebration in 2022 and is still struggling to break free from the role of a glorified reading. (The line is ultra-fine: Gatz is a gloriouswe reading and theatre throughout.) Bloomsdays around the world feature marathon recitations of Joyce’s entire text, often lasting well over 24 hours, and in the post-show discussion, Collins speaks, perhaps with Gatz always in the corner of his eye, acknowledged the temptation of such a feat. “In a perverse and kind of silly way, we wanted to be able to say we did the whole book,” he said. “The first idea was to just take a page from each chapter,” added Scott Shepherd, Collins’ co-director and the inventor of the unique teleprompter software that ERS uses to play with text and time onstage. Shepherd is also the actor around whom ERS shows revolve. Although here he plays henchmen and comic libertines like Buck Mulligan and Blazes Boylan, he still exerts a magnetism within the production, and his software – given visual life by Matthew Deinhart’s projections that transform the deliberately drab, conference-like set of the ubiquitous Dots collective into a blank page waiting for words – is the engine of the machine. ERS actually “does” the whole book, if you count the many passages that flash by in a projected blur, while Ben Jalosa Williams’ sound design gives us the unmistakable, confused squeak of a tape in fast-forward. The actors cling to the edges of tables or are pushed back into their chairs with the force of a comic storm. It’s a great effect – the first time. It’s still good the third or fourth time. Then it becomes clear that the production will never quite overcome this basic vocabulary. It’s play, fast-forward, play, fast-forward, straight to the end, and it’s tiring.

Shepherd’s technique – which includes a large clock on the back wall that jumps forward along with the text, allowing us to follow Joyce’s characters through their epic day – carries the excitement and risk of all novelty. It is ingenious and can easily flatten into the predictable, even the gimmicky, if there is no other driving force more gripping, more fleshly and more human in the mix. Collins and his actors know this: as the confused, betrayed advertising executive Leopold Bloom, Vin Knight stands astride the furniture and exultantly proclaims his cri de cœur – “There is still much to see, hear and feel. Feel living, warm beings near you. Let them sleep in their maggot beds. They will do me no good this innings. Warm beds: warm, full-blooded life.” Yes! you think for a moment – then the moment passes like the blink of a firefly. The show never achieves a sustained energy or vibrancy, a golden thread that ties together its moments of illumination.

Here one comes across questions about the nature of one form versus the other. Joyce’s novel, in all its blatantly boastful modernist maximalism, is a million and one things – an eighteen-part variation of The Odyssey; a bubbling fountain of various streams of consciousness; a dance with Shakespeare and Dante and Milton and countless other footnotes; a walk through Dublin; an experiment in diction from the slangy to the archaic, from the highly poetic to the devilishly lascivious. It is porn And it’s HBO! And also the graduate seminar of your dreams (or nightmares, depending). To bring it to the stage, you have to find a visceral way to convey its heady, calorific heterogeneity—and while ERS Ulysses gives us the collage, but not the consistent kick. Episodes tend to feel similar in weight and tone. The long first act drags on until the end, its erudition blurring into dramatic monotony. Characters — with the exception of Bloom, whom Knight plays with a light, sympathetic touch — aren’t portrayed in a way that really lets us share in their stakes or their souls.

It’s true that with such demanding material, a certain breadth and flatness of character can work well when something else lifts our spirits, but it’s not enough. Joyce’s outpourings are sometimes intoxicating — but so would they be at a Bloomsday reading or a well-delivered audiobook. We have many other senses at play here, there’s still plenty to see and feel, but Collins’ use of the stage is, if not exactly restrained, at least largely familiar. Like participants in a congressional hearing, the actors linger behind their row of tables for far too long, and when they finally break open the architecture, the effect is not as wild and stirring as it wants to be. They make a mess, yes, but a fairly predictable one. The production uses a beautiful, resonant image for much of its marketing — a photograph of the company throwing papers in the air. It captures a spirit of joyful, breathless exuberance, a reckless, anti-academic rebellion in the style of Joyce that feels absolutely right, but that feeling (which is different from this idea) only very occasionally comes across the footlights during production.

What comes across is the filth. This is certainly entirely accurate, if not always convincing. Believe me, I have as much appreciation for Joyce’s insanely dirty love letters as anyone whose own sexual awakening was accompanied by Shakespeare in Love And The Mists of Avalon, not to mention Nora – but in their daring to go below the belt with Joyce, Collins and company miss opportunities to ascend into the cosmos. The two directions, it seems to me, are linked, even in the face of the pathos and depravity that Joyce sees in the human libido. But when we get to the eighteenth and final episode of Ulysses— Molly Bloom’s 22,000-word, nearly uninterrupted 2 a.m. interior monologue, which the show presents to us in its entirety — Maggie Hoffman’s Molly becomes so breathless and near climax during the book’s final words that the sense of her greater sublimity is muted. The rapturous crescendo of Molly’s “Yes, I said yes, I will yes” feels more like an earlier moment when her husband masturbated at the sight of a young woman on the beach than an extended confluence of physical lust, memory, presence, and deep, existential embrace of life.

That’s a shame, because Hoffman brings both expert precision and delicacy to so many of the speeches. Joyce offers no clues about where to pause, where to make turns, or where to build meaning, and Hoffman and Collins together have done the meticulous work of underscoring every little turn and thought loop. This attention to orchestration, which allows us to hear the melody of the text clearly amid its many harmonies and cacophonies, is the show’s crowning glory, and that’s certainly not nothing. Especially when Stephanie Weeks (who completes the ensemble along with Dee Beesnael, Kate Benson and Christopher-Rashee Stevenson) has the floor, the language flows like honey. If only the show always tasted so sweet in the convergence of all its parts.

Ulysses is at Bard’s Fisher Center in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York through July 14.