Even if you've never read James Joyce's Ulysses -- and how many people have -- you can still enjoy Sheila Callaghan's Dead City. While that classic novel provides the inspiration for this wonderful work, the play stands on its own as a detailed and moving portrait of contemporary life in New York City.

Still, anyone with even a passing familiarity with Ulysses will see the obvious parallels. The novel follows a day in the life of Leopold Bloom, a cuckolded advertising canvasser living in Dublin, who meets a young writer named Stephen Dedalus. Dead City is the story of Samantha Blossom (Elizabeth Norment), a Manhattan businesswoman who wakes up one morning to find that her husband Gabriel[...]