Ulysses

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Unlike the Elevator Repair Service’s full-length eight-hour stage adaptation of Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (complete with dinner break), their latest production in partnership with the 2026 Under the Radar Festival now at The Public Theater is an under three-hour version of James Joyce’s 732 page masterpiece Ulysses. (It takes three to 13 hours when read out loud at Symphony Space in the annual Bloomsday Festival each year and has taken 30 – 40 hours to read the complete text out loud in other readings.) This staging is sort of a Spark Notes adaptation choosing scenes from all 18 chapters of the book. A terrific summary of Joyce’s Dublin-set novel, it does not attempt (and probably wisely) to include Joyce’s wit and parody, references and quotes in multiple languages, the history of Ireland and a structure taken from Homer’s The Odyssey (Odysseus being the Greek name for Ulysses.) However, this exuberant, animated and vigorous staging by director John Collins with assistance by Scott Shepherd using seven actors to play 39 characters is a good introduction for the uninitiated and a good review for those who have read the complete novel.

Like ERS’s Gatz (the title for their The Great Gatsby adaptation) the evening begins as a reading with all seven actors seated at a long conference table. While they take turns reading as well as enacting the various characters, Stephanie Weeks is the main reader in this half. In the second half which includes “Ulysses in Nighttown,” the Circe chapter written in the form of a play as well as concluding with a portion of Molly Bloom’s famous stream of consciousness monologue which also ends the novel, the scenery by the collective Dots breaks apart and the actors are on their feet almost throughout. As the story recounts the 24-hour events of a single day, June 16, 1904, there is an analog clock on the back wall which keeps time, going backward and forward as the chapters follow various characters in their perambulations around Dublin. The text is displayed on two monitors at the back of the theater (to aid to the actors?) and the cut portions are scrolled through at breakneck speed on the screen below the actors’ table (from projection designer Matthew Deinhart) while sound designer Ben Williams provides accompanying sound effects which suggest an old -fashioned tape recorder when fast-forwarded.

For those not familiar with the plot, the story begins with Stephen Dedalus (Christopher-Rashee Stevenson, a teacher and scholar, still mourning the recent death of his mother, trying to keep up with his medical student friends like debauched roommate Buck Mulligan (Scott Shepherd). The story then shifts to the Ulysses character, Leopold Bloom (Vin Knight), a wandering Jew in Catholic Dublin who works as a freelance advertising agent for the newspaper The Freeman’s Journal so, as you might expect, he needs to wander around the city all day long making sales.

His peregrinations include the post office, the cemetery for a funeral of a friend, the offices of his newspaper, a hotel, a pub, a maternity hospital, the beach on the strand, and ultimately in the second half in a brothel where he runs into Dedalus, who is estranged from his father Simon, a friend of Bloom’s. Bloom spends the day brooding about his opera singer wife Molly with whom he has not slept since the death of their 11-day-old son Rudy ten years before and who he knows is to begin an affair with Blazes Boylan, her agent (Shepherd again). Molly’s thoughts while she awaits Boylan punctuate the story as Bloom travels around Dublin meeting many of its citizens, not returning home until two AM in the morning from his evening wanderings.

The second half of the play and the story is a phantasmagorical dream which includes sound effects, a food fight and Bloom imagining giving birth to octuplets. Enver Chakartash’s costuming adds to the dream-like atmosphere with Dedalus dressed in an Eton suit with short pants which may make him a stand-in for the son that Bloom never saw grow up, and Bloom dressed in waistcoat, tie and jacket on the top half and a green wrap-around on the bottom. At times Marika Kent’s lighting is straight-forward and realistic, at other film noirish.

Under Collins’ astute direction the seven-member cast including some ERS regulars (Knight, Shepherd, Hoffman) are excellent playing between two and eight roles each, though they often change parts so quickly that it is difficult to recall who played what. As Stephen Dedalus, Stevenson is a brooding, intellectual presence. Knight as Leopold Bloom is instead not comic as often played before in other dramatizations but curious and out for a good time. Among Shepherd’s many roles are the swaggering Buck Mulligan and Blazes Boylan, as well as one of several narrators. Hoffman is an earthy presence as Molly Bloom, as well as creating seven other roles, both men and women. The rest of the multitalented cast is made up of Dee Beasnael, Kate Benson, Kelsey Vivian and the previously- mentioned Stephanie Weeks reappears in eight different roles.

Easy enough to follow, this Ulysses is for all audiences. Knowing the original text helps, but many who read the book in college may not still be conversant with it. While the play does not substitute for the book’s puns, wordplays and walking tour of Dublin, this is a trenchant stage version of Joyce’s novel that can be digested in one sitting.

Ulysses (extended through March 1, 2026)

Elevator Repair Service in partnership with the 2026 Under the Radar Festival

The Public Theater, 425 Lafayette Street, in Manhattan

For tickets, visit http://www.publictheater.org

Running time: two hours and 45 minutes including one intermission