ERS’s Ulysses Is a Little Stately, a Little Plump

We’re drowning in Gatsby adaptations, but it is tricky to match the splendor of Elevator Repair Service’s Gatz. Returning for an encore at the General public Theater this slide, the company’s 6-hour-extended rendering of each individual term of Fitzgerald’s reserve was its first adaptation of a novel, a theatrical method now pretty much synonymous with their identify. It’s also a marvel, an exponential curve of enchantment that coalesces patiently, even anti-drastically, until finally quickly you blink and come across that it has soared into outer area, in which it will stay for the improved part of a workday as you cling onto the tail of its comet. No ponder the company, so adventurous with the large boys of literature, needed to thrust even even more into the stratosphere: Now, at the Bard SummerScape pageant, ERS is premiering their get on James Joyce’s vertiginous Ulysses. (This time, while the book is more than 200,000 terms longer, the generation is shorter — about two hours and forty minutes.) In a talkback pursuing the performance I saw, ERS’s artistic director John Collins described the ensemble’s technique with a question: “What comes about when you set this matter on stage? Which is different,” he additional rapidly, “from, ‘How can we make this point into a enjoy?’” Central to their perform, he mentioned, is the “challenge of permitting the guide be itself.”

Which is a powerful starting off stage, but it leaves a further query haunting the wings like the ghost of aged Hamlet waiting for its entrance. What does a play want to be? Whether or not or not Ulysses is substantively its e-book-self in ERS’s staging, there’s also a piece of theater staying designed. And although trying to find to keep a novel’s essence—avoiding the tropes and traps of typical adaptation—is a very great matter, it isn’t always tantamount to crafting a whole-bodied, consistently gripping efficiency. ERS can do both equally, but here, they appear up short. It’s not accurately a situation of vaulting ambition: Relatively than heading much too big, far too wild, also considerably in trying Joyce’s Dublin doozy, they sense a very little safe, even at situations downright plodding.

ERS’s Ulysses started as a one particular-off commissioned by Symphony House for its Bloomsday centenary celebration in 2022, and it is continue to struggling to break away from currently being a glorified looking at. (The line is ultrafine: Gatz is a glorious reading through, and theatrical during.) Bloomsdays close to the earth element marathon recitals of Joyce’s total textual content that frequently operate well upwards of 24 hours, and, in the article-present dialogue, Collins, most likely also with Gatz at any time in his peripheral vision, acknowledged the temptation of this sort of a feat. “In a perverse and type of silly way, we required to be ready to say we did the whole e book,” he reported. “The very first strategy was let’s just just take a single web page from just about every chapter,” extra Scott Shepherd, Collins’s co-director and the creator of the special teleprompter software package ERS takes advantage of in order to play with text and time on stage. Shepherd is also the actor ERS displays are inclined to orbit all around. Even though listed here he plays sidekicks and comical rakes like Buck Mulligan and Blazes Boylan, he nevertheless exerts a gravitational pull inside the production, and his software—given visible lifetime by Matthew Deinhart’s projections, which flip the deliberately drab, conferencelike scenic structure by the ubiquitous dots collective into a blank site awaiting verbiage—is the engine of the equipment. ERS does indeed “do” the full ebook, if you depend the quite a few passages that zoom by in a projected blur although Ben Jalosa Williams’s audio design gives us the unmistakable jumbled squeal of a tape in fast ahead. The actors cling on to the edges of tables, or are slammed back in their chairs with the drive of a cartoon gale. It’s a fantastic impact — the initial time. By the third or fourth, it’s nevertheless superior. Then it becomes crystal clear that the production won’t at any time really transcend this foundational piece of vocabulary. It’s perform, quickly-forward, engage in, speedy-ahead, straight on as a result of to the conclusion, and it is wearying.

Shepherd’s tech—which also features a significant clock on the again wall that plunges ahead along with the textual content, permitting us to track Joyce’s figures all over their epic day—comes with the attractiveness and the threat of all novelties. It’s ingenious, and it can effortlessly flatten into predictability, even gimmickry, without the need of some other driving pressure, extra grippy and fleshy and human, in the combine. Collins and his actors know this: As the bemused, cuckolded adman Leopold Bloom, Vin Knight stands astride the furniture, exultant as he proclaims his cri de cœur — “Plenty to see and hear and really feel however. Really feel are living warm beings close to you. Permit them snooze in their maggoty beds. They are not going to get me this innings. Warm beds: warm fullblooded life.” Of course! you think for a minute — then the instant passes, like the blink of a lightning bug. The show in no way achieves a sustained electrical power or vibrancy, a golden string to tie its moments of illumination with each other.

Here’s the place one particular runs into all those queries about the nature of one sort versus another. Joyce’s novel, in all its unashamedly cocksure modernist maximalism, is a million and 1 factors — an eighteen-episode riff on The Odyssey a roiling spring for various streams of consciousness a dance with Shakespeare and Dante and Milton and plenty of other footnoteables a going for walks tour of Dublin an experiment in diction from the slangy to the archaic, the large-poetic to the devilishly prurient. It’s porn and it is HBO! And also the grad seminar of your desires (or nightmares, depending). To put it on phase indicates locating a visceral way to converse its heady, calorie-prosperous heterogeneity — and whilst ERS’s Ulysses presents us the collage, it doesn’t continuously give us the hurry. Episodes are inclined to sense very similar in fat and tone. The extensive to start with act drags close to the finish, its erudition blurring into dramatic monotony. Characters—with moments of exception for Bloom, whom Knight styles with a light-weight, sympathetic touch—aren’t rendered in a way that definitely allows us in on their stakes or their souls.

It’s correct that in this sort of heightened product, a particular broadness and flatness of character can get the job done just fantastic if something else is hoisting our spirits aloft, but not enough is. Joyce’s effusions are, at occasions, exhilarating — but so they would be in a Bloomsday looking through or a very well-shipped audiobook. We have loads of other senses in engage in listed here, loads to see and truly feel still, but Collins’s use of the stage is, if not precisely restrained, then largely common. Like individuals in a congressional hearing, the actors stay behind their row of tables for much way too long, and when they ultimately break up the architecture, the effect is not as rambunctiously galvanizing as it aspires to be. They make a mess, yes, but a relatively foreseeable 1. The creation is making use of a gorgeous, resonant graphic for substantially of its advertising and marketing — a photograph of the enterprise flinging papers up in the air. It captures a spirit of joyful, breathless mischief, a reckless, anti-tutorial Joycean revolt that feels unquestionably right, but that feeling (which is distinctive from that idea) crosses the footlights only pretty occasionally for the duration of the creation.

What does come across is the smut. Which is, assuredly, solely correct, if not normally compelling. Feel me, I have as a great deal appreciation for Joyce’s deliriously filthy appreciate letters as everyone whose possess sexual awakening involved Shakespeare in Appreciate and The Mists of Avalon, not to point out Nora — but in their gameness to go under the belt with Joyce, Collins and his business overlook options to go up into the cosmos. The two directions, it appears to me, are linked, even provided the pathos and seediness Joyce recognizes in the human libido. But when we get to the eighteenth and closing episode of Ulysses—Molly Bloom’s 2 a.m., 22,000 phrase, all but unpunctuated internal soliloquy, which the display provides us in its entirety—Maggie Hoffman’s Molly receives so breathy and near-to-climax during the book’s final text, that the feeling of their bigger transcendence is muted. The rapturous crescendo of Molly’s “yes I said yes I will Yes” feels extra akin to an previously instant in which her husband masturbated to the sight of a younger woman on the seaside, instead than an expansive confluence of bodily pleasure, memory, presence, and deep, existential embrace of lifetime.

It is a shame, simply because Hoffman provides both equally pro precision and tenderness to so substantially of the speech. Joyce gives no handholds for exactly where to pause, wherever to make the turns or assemble the perception, and Hoffman and Collins alongside one another have completed the meticulous operate of scoring every small twist and loop of imagined. This awareness to orchestration, to permitting us to listen to the text’s melody line evidently amidst its numerous harmonies and cacophonies, is the show’s crowning accomplishment, and it’s surely not very little. Particularly when Stephanie Weeks (who rounds out the ensemble together with Dee Beesnael, Kate Benson, and Christopher-Rashee Stevenson) has the ground, the language flows like honey. If only, in the convergence of all its elements, the display often tasted as sweet.

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