‘Ulysses,’ at the Public Theater, Brings James Joyce’s Masterpiece of a Dublin Day to the New York Stage

Before “Ulysses” was a play it was the most storied novel of the 20th century. Before that it was a book the likes of which had never been seen before, judged obscene in court and mad in the court of public opinion. Written on the Continent by an Irishman, James Joyce, it transpires over the course of a single day — June 16, 1904 — at a city, Dublin, that Joyce would not see for the final 39 years of his life. Never before or since has a city been so imagined in fiction.The troupe, Elevator Repair Service, that has brought “Ulysses” to the stage — it debuted at Bard in 2024 — is fresh off a dramatic edition of “The Great Gatsby” called “Gatz.” That interpretation, which stretched for eight hours, preserved every word of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s gem. This production, at a mere two hours and 45 minutes, eschews any attempt to speak all 260,000-odd words in Joyce’s book. Instead, we get selections.The sampling, though, is generous, with every one of “Ulysses” 18 chapters represented. A giant clock onstage keeps the time of the novel’s 18-hour day, speeding up as the action clicks forward. The book’s text scrolls on a screen behind the audience. Leaps in the narrative are signalled by sounds that resemble the screech of an audiotape on fast forward or a jump-cut sound effect in a video game. It falls to the cast of seven to interpret Joyce for 2026.“Ulysses” is almost as impossible to summarize as it is to stage, though in this case a staging is a good way to get to a rough summary. Its protagonist is an Irish Jew, Leopold Bloom, who wanders Dublin’s streets. His wife Molly is conducting an affair that Bloom half-knows is happening. Among the characters that Bloom meets are Stephen Dadalus, a young if somewhat arid scholar, and a legion of Dublin’s riff raff. Bloom ends a long day in his own bed. That précis, though, is like saying that “Hamlet” is about medieval Danish court politics. “Ulysess” is a riot of languages, voices, and sensibilities, an avant garde atomic bomb dropped to the neat hedgerows of the 19th century novel. Joyce borrowed the book’s structure from Homer’s “Odyssey,” but smuggled inside that Trojan Horse the stuff he knew of modern life — advertisements, antisemitism, nationalism, newspapers, Irishness, and more. First edition of ‘Ulysses’ by James Joyce. Paris, 1922. Via Wikimedia CommonsBloom leaves his home at Seven Eccles Street in the morning and returns there in the evening. In between, he encounters nothing less than the entire world, as seen in the second city of the British Empire. Joyce’s madcap modernism, though, means that this riot of life is never presented straightforwardly. Instead, a cacophony of voices and styles careens from puns to philosophy, bar talk to Bardolatry. The book is a monument that never feels like a tomb.Elevator Repair Service captures some of this invention with a dizzying array of costume changes, props, and inspired set design that does justice to Joyce’s concept that each of his book’s chapters is a world unto itself, with a distinctive mode of perception. Chapter 15, “Circe,” is a pulsing phantasmagoria that takes place at Dublin’s brothel district. It so lends itself to the stage that Zero Mostel starred in a 1974 treatment, “Ulysses in Nighttown.”The fourth chapter, “Calypso,” begins with the famous intonation “Mr. Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liver slices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencods’ roes. Most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine.” Bloom is here played by an amiable Vin Knight, who presents him as a man of earthly pleasures.A viewer is struck by the absence of an Irish accent among any of the company, all of whom depict Joyce’s world with gusto. Still, this is universal by way of Ireland. That makes it all the more remarkable that Joyce delivers such a rich meditation on Jewishness. Bloom supports Sinn Féin and hums Hatikvah, backs Home Rule and remembers ”Poor papa with his hagadah book, reading backwards with his finger to me. Pessach. Next year in Jerusalem.”“Ulysses” is also great fun, and the ensemble are keyed into Joyce’s comedic mode. Dublin Bay is described as the “snotgreen sea, the scrotumtightening sea,” a humorous switch of register from, say, Swinburne’s 1866 description of the ocean as a “Great, sweet mother.” Fun is had at Dedalus’s expense, and Bloom too comes in for mockery. Cuckoldry is a leitmotif that has been mined for humor since ancient times, and a boozy bathos permeates.Joyce’s genius, though, is to make room for moments of intense feeling amid the carnival. Here the play slows down to capture, say, Bloom’s memory of lust with a young girl named Gerty MacDowell. The scene, one of the book’s most famous, is pathetic and poignant and a triumph of juxtaposition that shows Joyce at his peak. The play, like the book, ends with Molly Bloom’s extraordinary monologue, with its one simple word: “Yes.”“Ulysses” is one of the rare books that had to prove its worth in court. Initially banned as obscene in 1921 — on account of the MacDowell episode — the book’s import was allowed only by a ruling of Judge John Woolsey in 1933. The book’s lawyer, Morris Ernst, wrote after that ruling that “The New Deal in the law of letters is here.” Woolsey called the book “an amazing tour de force.” One imagines he would have enjoyed the play he made possible.

‘Ulysses,’ at the Public Theater, Brings James Joyce’s Masterpiece of a Dublin Day to the New York Stage

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