Jeffrey Sweet–Making the Scene

I tried to read James Joyce’s Ulysses three times without success. Then I switched to the Audible recording of the book, read by Jim Norton, with Marcelle Riordan as Molly. Before plunging into each chapter, I listened to a lecture on what was to come to help me focus on what I should be following. It took me a few months to work my way through it, but I can say that I heard every word of the book and an awful lot of material about it.

I cannot claim to have had a deep experience with it. I feel as if Ulysses is a continent and I took a flight over it and looked out the window. But I’m grateful to have heard Norton and Riordan, because I came out of the experience with a basic understanding of the story, the chief characters, and many of the themes. If I had not had the experience, I would have been in trouble watching the Elevator Repair Service’s stage adaptation currently playing at the Public Theater.

I didn’t expect it to accomplish what ERS did with F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. As you probably heard, they read every word of that book. They also put it into a context – a group of office workers breaking through their isolation by experiencing the book together – that added an additional layer of meaning. Ulysses is huge, so reading it all would be nuts. (As I recall, a team of readers, trading off chapter by chapter, used to do just that once a year at Symphony Space.) So the ERS has chosen to focus on excerpts that they believe lend themselves to staging.

I’m sorry to say that, if I hadn’t experienced Norton and Riordan and the commentators, I would have little idea what the story of Ulysses is from what the ERS does. There are many enjoyable bits of staging, but I doubt I would have figured out who was trying to accomplish what or, indeed, why the story is organized as it is.

Dramatizing novels is a tricky business. I tend to divide novels between works that describe behavior and works that are records of perception. It is easier to stage works that are primarily descriptions of behavior. This is why so much Dickens has been adapted successfully. (How many times has A Christmas Carol been staged and filmed?) And it’s one of the reasons that second-rate fiction can sometimes be turned into first-rate drama. Nobody would claim that The Godfather is a great piece of literature, but it is the basis of two great American films. The Corleones are always doing something interesting.

Though there are some raucous scenes in Ulysses, the heart of the book is the characters’ thoughts, not their behavior. What’s more, Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus do little that is observable in pursuit of objectives we only understand because we have access to their thoughts. They spend most of their time coping with what they encounter throughout a day. Toward the end, when they finally have a sustained scene together, there is some satisfaction that these two men, who we sense need each other, are able to find pleasure in each other’s company in a quasi-father-son way.

For years, actors have been attracted to Molly’s final monologue in stage and screen presentations. It comes as no surprise that the most satisfying section of this ambitious but frustrating evening should be Maggie Hoffman’s unadorned take on the speech. The theatrical gimmicks (the fog, the projections, the music) have been shut off, and the text, which has always cried out for a human voice, is offered simply, beautifully.