Ulysses Off-Broadway Reviews

ERS’s is not the first theatrical adaptation of Ulysses, though many others have focused only on certain episodes or characters. Tackling the whole book is a signature ERS move; the company has cast many of its usual suspects in Ulysses, and none disappoint. Weeks goes from waifish to dominatrix as Martha; Shepherd’s bouncing take on Blazes Boylan becomes a choreographic leitmotif; Kate Benson goes from doctor to sex worker to enraged drunkard in the blink of an eye; and Stevenson’s feline gaze and vocalizations are so perfect that I indeed hoped the cat would come back.

Viewers conversant with the text may be surprised by which sections and folk are highlighted or skipped in this nimbly paced rendition, but that can be fun for Joyce devotees and former English majors. Plenty to talk about afterward. Like the novel, this Ulysses is best enjoyed in patches rather than as a whole. Although Ulysses remains too big a monster for the stage, let’s hope ERS tackles other modernist masterpieces. Are they taking requests? How about Zuleika Dobson, Max Beerbohm’s miniature classic about the Edwardian beauty who killed all those nice university boys?

Fans of Joyce will find much to savor here, and much to dissect. Newbies can get lost in the rhythms of the author’s language as well as the trickiness of the plot, which tends to drag in the overlong first act. (It pays to arrive early enough to download the plot synopsis produced for the show and shared via QR code outside the theater.) But this feels more like gloss than adaptation, an exercise that captures elements of the source material without ever standing on its own terms.

Ulysses—on the page or stage—isn’t for the intellectually fatigued or those not well-caffeinated. Compacted into a brisk two hours and forty minutes, co-directors John Collins and Scott Shepherd and their creative team employ a bevy of props, projections, and screeching sound cues (courtesy of Ben Williams) to indicate the passage of time. Recurring themes ranging from anti-Semitism and nationalism to repressed sexuality appear throughout Joyce’s text. The seven-person ensemble undertakes dozens of roles, and while plenty of captivating moments surface, the whole fails to be greater than the sum of the parts.