"One of the reasons we like working with literature is because it gives us a big problem of form that we have to grapple with, while also coming with the gravity of these great novels," says John Collins, the artistic director of New York theater company Elevator Repair Service, which from June 20 through July 14 will stage the world premiere of its original adaptation of James Joyce's Ulysses at Bard College's Fisher Center as part of the 2024 Bard SummerScape festival. "I had always wanted us to take on something that was big and intimidating, something that would require a new and unique approach. I think I got my wish."
No doubt. Besides being known as one of the most important, game-changing works of modernist literature, Joyce's epic, stream-of-consciousness 1922 novel about the lives of three Dublin natives over the course of a single day has long enjoyed a reputation as being one of the canon's most confounding reads. Much of that is by the design of the author, who loosely based the story on Homer's Odyssey and maintained that he "put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that's the only way of insuring one's immortality."
If there's one theatrical ensemble in America that is up for taking on such a project, however, it's Elevator Repair Service. Founded in 1991 by Collins, who for 13 years worked as a sound designer at the pivotal Wooster Group (the alma mater of Willem Defoe and Spaulding Gray), Elevator Repair Service—cited as "one of New York City's few truly essential theater companies" by the New York Times—has produced acclaimed adaptations of other modernist works, including a version of William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury; "The Select," a reworking of Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises; and, most famously, "Gatz," an eight-hour performance of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby.
The idea of doing "Ulysses" came via a 2019 proposal by Symphony Space, for which ERS staged a work-in-progress version at the Upper West Side theater's event for Bloomsday, a yearly international celebration of the novel that takes its name from Leopold Bloom, the book's central character. "It seemed like a crazy idea, genuinely impossible," Collins recalls. "But that just made it more attractive." Although theatrical presentations of Ulysses have been attempted before—1958's Off-Broadway "Ulysses in Nighttime" starring Zero Mostel as Bloom, and later in Ireland, Scotland, and elsewhere in New York—ERS's version is, says Collins, very different from those incarnations.
"The tendency in the past has been to do something more stylized, unified, or coherent," he explains. "But we weren't looking to clean up or simplify anything. We're also not purists; it's not the entire book, although there are verbatim excerpts. [Dramaturgist and codirector] Scott Sheppard did an amazing job with the complicated task of sifting through the text and finding the sweet spot with an honest representation of form and meaning. All the energy and life, the humor and profanity, are packed in. We love trying to figure out what to do with this collision of theater and literature, and the challenge is a little different every time."
Bard SummerScape will present the world premiere of Elevator Repair Service's "Ulysses" in the LUMA Theater at the Fisher Center on the campus of Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson from June 20 through July 14.
