So how would someone go about hauling this colossal work onto a theater stage?
“Joyce’s project is impossible — trying to capture the essence of human experience through language,” said Gideon Lester, the artistic director at the Fisher Center at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y., where “Ulysses” premiered on June 20 and runs through July 14. In attempting an adaptation, Lester said, “you’re adding another layer of impossibility.”
“I think the difficulty of the novel is in some ways the wall that we’re trying to climb, or throw ourselves against,” Collins said.
Elevator Repair Service, founded in 1991 and known for creating theater out of literature and found texts, has a particular soft spot for American classics from the 1920s: The company has previously adapted Hemingway and Faulkner, making its name with “Gatz,” an exuberant, bordering on absurd, exercise in fidelity in which the actors performed F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby” word for word over nearly seven hours. The play starts with a bored office worker reading aloud from a battered paperback, his colleagues eventually getting conscripted into various roles.
“Ulysses” — which follows Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus as they wander through Dublin over the course of one day, June 16, 1904 — presented a special challenge. Taking the “Gatz” approach was out of the question; you can’t make audiences sit through the entirety of “Ulysses.” At the same time, skipping whole scenes or chapters, as they’d done for “The Sun Also Rises,” meant losing some major ideas.
“It’s so vast — and what’s sort of condensed in its DNA, at the heart of the project, is this policy of inclusion,” said Scott Shepherd, the play’s co-director and dramaturge. (Shepherd, an accomplished actor who played the narrator in “Gatz,” also acts in the cast of “Ulysses.”) “You don’t have a lot of guidance about what to select — because all of it’s equally important, in Joyce’s treatment. All the details are salient.”
First they tried a systematic approach, taking a representative page from each chapter of the book, but that proved too restrictive. Then, Shepherd proposed tracking a few key plot threads, largely stemming from Bloom’s obsessions. The directors picked up on every time that Bloom spots Blazes Boylan, his wife Molly’s lover; they also tracked smaller, “stranger” motifs, Collins said — like the journey of the potato that Bloom carries in his pocket.
“The novel is kind of like a crazy abstract picture full of details, that if you stare at it long enough, you start to see shapes,” he said. These threads gave the theater piece its structure and would give the audience something to hold onto: “It presents the novel as a web of connective tissue and not as something that was vomited out.”
Inspiration struck from an unlikely source: a trailer for Brian De Palma’s “Femme Fatale,” from 2002, which shows the entire movie in roughly two minutes, most of it fast-forwarded in a flash of images except for a few key sequences. The entire text of Joyce’s novel is projected onstage, sometimes scrolling in a blur, and other times moving at readable speed. Shepherd wrote software that synced the movements of a clock, displayed on the set, to points when Joyce drops a time reference — the minute hand jumping when a character realizes he’s mistaken the time or rewinding to catch up with the activities of Dedalus earlier that morning.
Turning “Ulysses” into theater brings out a quality of the novel that often gets overshadowed by its fearsome reputation — a quality that Joyce has in common with Fitzgerald, according to Shepherd: “The energy is so playful. There’s so much zest for life.” He continued, “What’s different is, Joyce is a lot dirtier than Fitzgerald.”
“The profanity, the scatological, all of that gross, sometimes childish stuff that Joyce is so preoccupied with, in this wonderful and playful way — that gets to be exactly what it is, onstage,” Collins said. What can look semi-serious when printed on a page becomes hilarious when spoken out loud and embodied by the actors.
This lighter side of Joyce has surprised some early viewers, Lester reported. One colleague, watching a dress rehearsal with him, turned and whispered, “Is every word of this actually from Joyce?” Lester replied: “You will never again fart in bed without thinking of Molly Bloom.”
But while the directors hope that their version of “Ulysses” feels lively and human, enticing readers to dive headlong into the original text, they haven’t aimed to shed Joyce’s daunting, bewildering difficulty.
“What we try to bring to it is the spirit Joyce expects,” Collins said. “Which is like, ‘It’s okay! You don’t know what’s going on yet. You’re going to figure it out. Just come along for the ride.’”
