Review: Leopold Bloom for Rookies and Pros in a Hilarious Ulysses

Of all the novels that you could adapt for the stage, James Joyce’s Ulysses might seem like one you’d want to steer clear of. It’s very long and famously difficult to read, much less to dramatize, yet such is the ongoing fascination with it that intrepid artists do occasionally attempt to stage at least parts of it, some with great success.

Elevator Repair Service took up the challenge of making a play out of Ulysses in 2024 and is now performing it at the Public Theater. Unlike their production of Gatz, an eight-hour verbatim dramatization of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Ulysses is mercifully not a reading of the entire novel (audio versions can run over 40 hours). But as with Gatz, it’s an absolute thrill to watch this innovative company bring a great novel to life. Here, a brilliant cast of seven squeezes the succulent fruit of Joyce’s funny, poignant, and often sexually explicit prose in a delicious smorgasbord of scenes from Ulysses that, even at three hours, left me wanting more.

Director John Collins knows that some will come into the theater with little or no knowledge of the novel, so the show starts with the basics, delivered welcomingly by actor Scott Shepherd. The novel follows the thoughts and quasi-Homeric wanderings of young scholar Stephen Dedalus and middle-aged Leopold Bloom as they make their way through the streets of Dublin over the course of a single day, June 16, 1904. Then, with the seven actors seated at a long table (scenic design by dots), we watch Joyce’s text (projections by Matthew Deinhart) scroll by—and regularly fast-forward (screechy, racing-dialogue sound effects by Ben Williams)—as we journey rapidly through the entire text while a clock indicates when events take place.

We’re introduced to the cerebral Stephen (Christopher-Rashee Stevenson), a young man wracked by guilt for denying the deathbed request of his mother (Stephanie Weeks), and Leopold Bloom (a brilliant Vin Knight), a Jew navigating the bigotry of Catholic Dublin while being tormented by thoughts of a sexual affair between his wife, Molly (Maggie Hoffman), and the swaggering Blazes Boylan (Shepherd, hilariously sauntering across the stage with rubbery limbs flailing). Even for those familiar with the novel, the performances capture the vitality and humor that Joyce intended but that sometimes get lost on the page.

Joyce created an enormous matrix of everyday minutiae and intimate thoughts that these and dozens of other characters experience in his 700-page magnum opus, making a meaningful summary of the novel tough—though the Public Theater does try (scan the QR code posted outside the theater on your way in). ERS has done justice to the novel, however, by selecting choice scenes from each of the novel’s 18 chapters. Memorable moments include Weeks’s hysterical reading of Martha’s love letter to Bloom, Kate Benson’s off-the-wall portrayal of the xenophobic “citizen,” Dee Beasbael’s charming portrayal of Bloom’s former love interest Mrs. Breen, as well as the entire hallucinatory Nighttown episode, brought feverishly to life by Marika Kent’s phantasmagoric lighting and Williams’s throbbing music. Capping off the show is Molly’s iconic monologue, performed with earthy elegance by Hoffman.

The details of this frenetic and exuberant production will give Joyceans in the audience lots of Easter eggs to crack open, down to the Eton-style uniform that Stephen wears (costumes by Enver Chakartash). It’s a touching allusion to Bloom’s deceased son, Rudy, as well as a testament to ERS’s deep love and knowledge of the novel. But more than that, this Ulysses is a great entry point for those who don’t know the novel but might want to take a swing at it. My partner came into this production as a Bloomian blank slate but left wanting to read the book. As far as reviews go, that sounds like a resounding Yes!