Who’s afraid of James Joyce? Elevator Repair Service takes a tour of ‘Ulysses’
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- A stage adaptation of ‘Ulysses’ presented by UCLA’s Center for the Art of Performance inspires a rereading of the James Joyce classic, and the takeaways are different this time around.
- One strategy: Alternate a reading of a chapter with listening to RTÉ recordings of the same.
- In the end, the book — and the Elevator Repair Service production — deliver unexpected rewards.
“Ulysses” may not be James Joyce’s most difficult novel. That distinction would have to go to “Finnegans Wake,” a book that has been described as unreadable even by its most fervent admirers. But “Ulysses,” the modernist novel that changed the course of 20th century literature, is notoriously demanding.
The book bested me when I first gave it a go in my student days. I expected to sprint through “Ulysses” in a couple of weeks but found myself running uphill in a race I feared might never end. I finally did make it to the finish line, panting and red-faced. But I knew Joyce and I would have to have another rendezvous when I wasn’t in such a rush to check a canonical box.
It took more than 35 years for that reunion to happen. The book came back on my radar because Elevator Repair Service, the offbeat New York performance troupe best known for “Gatz,” a marathon rendering of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby,” was coming to town with its stage version of “Ulysses.” (The production, presented by Center for the Art of Performance, had a brief run last weekend at UCLA Little Theater.)
But something else was drawing me back to Joyce, a need to breathe purer air. I could spend my free time doomscrolling, or I could challenge myself to a higher pleasure.
This time around I imposed no deadline. I would read “Ulysses” for the sheer pleasure of reading. It didn’t take long to be reminded that pleasure isn’t necessarily pain-free. I struggled past the roadblocks, cursing at what I took to be Joyce’s willful obscurity as I consulted Terence Killeen’s “Ulysses Unbound,” a user-friendly reader’s guide, as well as myriad online resources, including Google Translate to contend with the polyglot author’s staggering range.
I extemporized a program of reading a chapter on my own and then listening to it via the excellent RTÉ recordings of “Ulysses” (available as a podcast) that bring to life the novel’s symphony of voices. The exhilaration I came to experience entailed a fair amount of exasperation. The exertion that was required seemed to belong to a pre-internet age.
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Joyce, allergic to exposition, plunges the reader into sink-or-swim situations. The architecture of the book follows the plan of Homer’s “Odyssey.” Leopold Bloom is the unlikely modern-day Ulysses (Odysseus’ Latin name), a newspaper ad salesman with an adulterous wife who is making his circuitous way home to see what remains after his tactical daylong absence. Stephen Dedalus, Joyce’s alter ego from “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,” is thrust into the role of Telemachus, Odysseus’ son, recast as a lofty aesthete grieving the death of his mother while keeping his distance from his overbearing, dissolute father.
Into this complex scheme, Joyce incorporates all sorts of radical literary experiments. The most important of these is the stream of consciousness technique that’s developed in ways that had never been attempted before. Joyce tunes into the inner musings of his characters as easily as he samples the collective consciousness, past and present. The novel, Edmund Wilson writes in his super-lucid chapter on Joyce in “Axel’s Castle,” moves from the ripest naturalism, awash in bodily secretions and pungent smells, to the most feverish symbolism, where dream logic liquefies objective reality.
What I derived from the novel in my late 50s is not what I took away in my 20s. I was amused at what I had underlined as an overeager student, always on the lookout for the explanatory phrase. But I’m sure in time my latest markings in the book, like photos of an old hairstyle, will also elicit an eye roll. A literary work as dense as “Ulysses” can’t help but serve as a mirror of one’s mental life.
My experience of this ERS production is unique to the moment of my encounter. Had I not just cohabited with “Ulysses” for the last month, I no doubt would have spent the intermission reading chapter summaries on my phone to get a deeper understanding of the story.
I was relieved that this version of “Ulysses” wasn’t an eight-hour affair like “Gatz,” which offered the complete text of “The Great Gatsby.” (Joyce’s novel would take at least 24 hours to read aloud, or all of Bloomsday, the annual celebration of the author.) The novel’s 18 chapters are served cafeteria-style, a little from this section, a little from that, to provide an overview of the main action.
The focus is on Bloom’s wanderings through Dublin on June 16, 1904, the day his wife, Molly, a noted singer, begins an affair with a professional colleague named Blazes Boylan. Subsidiary but no less integral is Stephen’s crisscrossing path through the city. When these displaced, grief-laden men lingeringly intersect late in the novel, nothing really changes in terms of the plot but everything changes in terms of the book’s spiritual design.
In the intimate confines of Macgowan Hall’s Little Theater, seven actors took their seats at conference tables lined up for what looked like a panel discussion. An institutional clock kept track of the fictional time of day. Scott Shepherd, an ERS mainstay who was not only part of the ensemble but also co-directed with John Collins and served as dramaturg, introduced the proceedings in an impishly folksy manner reminiscent of the Stage Manager in Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town.”
He explained that the text would be fast-forwarded regularly. When this happened, the sound of a screeching tape catapulted the company to another passage in the book. Joyce’s words rang out mellifluously at the start of the production, but as the main characters emerged from the reading, some of the musicality of the writing was lost.
ERS doesn’t traffic in emotional realism or literal re-creation. The company’s aesthetic mode is wayward, oblique, loose and jocular. In “Gatz,” the novel’s narrative texture was conveyed through zany approximation — the troupe finding Fitzgerald not by effacing itself but by embracing its eccentric difference.
The same eventually happened here, but I had to resign myself to what was missing.
What I find irresistible about “Ulysses” is the clarity with which the interior lives of Stephen and Bloom come into view. Amid all the rhetorical puzzles and literary pyrotechnics, these characters reveal to us their longings and insecurities, their preoccupations and rationalizations, their alienation and sociability — in short, their souls or, as Bloom more scientifically defines this mystical human substance, “gray matter.”
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Hamlet-figures dressed in inky black, they are both processing loss. Bloom, whose day’s journey takes him to the funeral of a friend, is still mourning his son, Rudy, who died shortly after birth. Stephen, called back from Paris as his mother was dying, is tormented a year later by his refusal to pray over her as she entreated him to do.
Estranged in different ways — Bloom as a Jew (with a wife with a loose reputation) and Stephen as a freethinking young artist in Catholic Ireland — they have complementary needs. Bloom to love and to pass on some of what he has learned, Stephen to become secure and stable enough to realize his enormous potential.
On stage, Stephen (Christopher-Rashee Stevenson), wearing the suit jacket and short trousers of a schoolboy prince of Denmark, was a strangely recessive presence. Stevenson seemed to deliberately deflect attention from Stephen’s words, mumbling lines as though they were the character’s private property and not meant to be spoken aloud. (A defensible literary interpretation but a theatrically deadening one.) Stevenson actually created a more vivid impression in his brief appearance as Bloom’s cat.
Vin Knight was more dynamic as Bloom, the adaptation’s clear protagonist. Costume designer Enver Chakartash dressed the character, described at one point in the book as a “new womanly man,” in a mourning jacket and complicated skirt, with green socks adding a fey accent to the gender-fluid ensemble. Knight found the gravity of the pragmatic, rational Bloom while preserving his essential nimbleness.
The surrogate father-son flirtation between Stephen and Bloom accumulated power more through the staging than through acting. Scenically, the narrative built as it proceeded. The conference tables were imaginatively reconfigured by the design collective dots for the surreal brothel scene, and the lighting of Marika Kent made wild magic without disrupting the minimalist scheme.
The production was somewhat more adept in telling than showing. (Stephanie Weeks, Dee Beasnael and Kate Benson, in addition to playing numerous supporting characters, helped keep the narration smoothly on track.)
I wish everyone had Shepherd’s command of the company’s house style. His cameos as Blazes Boylan, jitterbugging across the stage with the self-satisfied air of a country rake, were not just enlivening but renewing, capturing the character in a new idiom.
Maggie Hoffman delivered Molly’s stream of erotic consciousness that ends the novel with just the right touch of unabashed earthiness. If I hadn’t recently listened to the brilliant rendition of Pegg Monahan in the RTÉ Broadcast, I might not have missed the ferocious Irish lilt that animates the animal lusts and petty grievances of Joyce’s character.
I should confess that I turned to the novel as an escape from my disgust with our political situation. But politics runs through the book. Ireland is under brutal colonial rule, and partisan conflict is as inescapable as religious strife.
But Stephen and Bloom don’t want to be dominated by ideology. Stephen resists having his intellectual freedom ensnared by patriotic sanctimony: “Let my country die for me,” he drunkenly tells a British soldier.
Bloom contends that “Force, hatred, history, all that” are “not life for men and women, insult and hatred.” It’s the opposite of these things “that is really life,” by which he means “love.”
Joyce gives us this insight in a book that understands that it’s no more possible to dismiss politics than it is to do away with the demands of the body. We exist in concentric realms, and our multifarious lives can only be lived. The same is true for art. There are things I wanted from this stage production that I didn’t get. But there were unexpected rewards, and my view of “Ulysses” expanded.
We must make room on the bed of life and say, as Molly does in the book’s last word: “Yes.”
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