“Parsing Joyce: ERS’s ULYSSES Demonstrates Without Embodying”

Good readers create images as they navigate dense text, constructing a personal vision of the world on the page. Elevator Repair Service’s production of James Joyce’s “Ulysses,” currently playing at the Public Theater’s Martinson Hall, offers the company’s own kaleidoscopic image of Joyce’s epic novel—a playful, fragmented encounter with one of modernism’s most celebrated and notoriously “unstageable” works. But what ERS has created over the course of two hours and forty-five minutes raises a question more interesting than whether the adaptation succeeds or fails: Is this theater at all, or something else entirely? With Joyce’s complete text scrolling behind the performers as they leap through selected episodes of Leopold Bloom’s day in Dublin, the production doesn’t so much stage the novel as parse it—demonstrating its structures and rhythms rather than fully embodies them. The result is an experience that divides audiences into two camps: those who know Joyce’s labyrinth well enough to fill in the considerable gaps, and those encountering Bloom, Molly, and Stephen for the first time, left to construct what framework they can from the fragments.

The production’s methodology announces itself immediately. Behind the performers, Joyce’s complete text scrolls continuously on screens—a reminder of the novel’s vastness and the impossibility of the task at hand. As Scott Shepherd explains in his opening remarks, they will “fast forward once in a while” through the 700-page novel to fit it into the evening’s running time. What follows is less adaptation than a selective demonstration of Joyce’s text, with the ensemble leaping from episode to episode, skipping whole sections, condensing hours of Bloom’s day into minutes of stage time. The seven actors shift fluidly between roles—one moment playing Bloom or Stephen or Molly, the next voicing a minor character or the novel’s third-person narrator.

But here’s the crucial distinction: ERS doesn’t read Joyce’s text so much as parse it. The company demonstrates the novel’s structures, points to its techniques, explains its enigmas (Shepherd breaks frame at one point to note that we never actually learn how Bloom knows Boylan is visiting Molly at 4:00 p.m.), but rarely allows the audience to sink into the lived experience of these characters. It’s the difference between analyzing a poem’s meter and being moved by its music. The production operates more like a theatrical seminar than a fully realized drama—smart, playful, intellectually engaging, but maintaining a critical distance from the emotional depths Joyce plumbed. The actors remain interpreters of the text rather than inhabitants of its world.

This approach creates two fundamentally different experiences in Martinson Hall. Those who arrive with firm knowledge of Joyce’s novel can fill in the considerable gaps, track characters even as actors shift between roles, and appreciate which episodes ERS has chosen to highlight and which to skip entirely. For these viewers, the production offers the pleasure of recognition—seeing their own mental images of Bloom’s wanderings given theatrical form, however fragmented.

For those encountering Joyce’s world for the first time, the experience is more elusive. When actors switch from playing Bloom to voicing minor characters to narrating third-person passages, often within the same scene, it becomes nearly impossible to track who’s who. The narrative framework does emerge: we can piece together that Leopold Bloom is wandering Dublin through a day marked by his wife Molly’s infidelity with Blazes Boylan, that Bloom has a rich fantasy life and a compassionate nature, that he encounters various Dubliners in restaurants and bars and brothels, that he connects briefly with young Stephen Dedalus before returning home to Molly. But the full novel—Joyce’s intricate web of parallels, symbols, and structural experiments—remains inaccessible without prior knowledge.

The production gestures toward its Homeric underpinnings (Bloom as Odysseus wandering home, Molly as Penelope waiting, Stephen as Telemachus seeking a father), but these parallels register only faintly. You don’t need to know the Odyssey to follow Bloom’s day, but you do need to know “Ulysses” to experience much beyond its outline.

What the production sacrifices in character development and narrative coherence, it partially recovers in thematic clarity. Joyce’s great subjects—persecution, loneliness, the outsider’s experience, the question of what constitutes community—emerge with surprising force even from this fragmented presentation. When Bloom defends himself in Barney Kiernan’s pub against the antisemitic Citizen, his words land with contemporary resonance: “Plundered. Insulted. Persecuted. Taking what belongs to us by right. At this very moment.” The production may not give us a fully realized Leopold Bloom, but it does give us his essential condition—the wandering Jew, the man who doesn’t quite belong, the observer watching his wife’s lover pass him on the street.

There are moments when Bloom seems less like Homer’s Odysseus than another literary outsider: T.S. Eliot’s J. Alfred Prufrock. Both are paralyzed observers, measuring out their lives in small rituals and interior monologues, watching from the margins of experience. But where Eliot offers no exit from Prufrock’s paralysis, Joyce gives us Bloom’s quiet humanity—his compassion for the laboring Mina Purefoy, his care for the drunken Stephen, his final acceptance of what he cannot change. The production may not fully dramatize this compassion, but the text itself carries it through.

The question “What is a nation?” echoes through the evening, and Joyce’s answer—that the individual might constitute a nation unto himself—resonates in our own fractured moment. And when Maggie Hoffman finally delivers Molly’s climactic monologue, her litany of “yes” statements building to the final affirmation—”yes I said yes I will Yes”—the question becomes whether we, like Molly, can say yes to some future. In February 2026, with all our contemporary anxieties about what’s ahead, Joyce’s life-affirming conclusion lands with unexpected weight, even if the production cannot quite summon its full emotional force.

Director John Collins and co-director/dramaturg Scott Shepherd compensate for what their production sacrifices in emotional depth with something more democratic: an interpretive openness that invites rather than dictates. The evening is punctuated by moments of outright buffoonery—actors mugging, voices exaggerated, physical comedy that undercuts any pretense of solemnity. This isn’t a failure of seriousness but a deliberate strategy. By refusing to be authoritative, by keeping the tone playful and occasionally absurd, the production avoids claiming “This IS Ulysses” and instead offers “Here’s OUR encounter with Ulysses—what’s yours?”

The clowning creates breathing room, prevents the evening from collapsing under the weight of Joyce’s reputation or the production’s own ambitions. It allows audience members to tap into the text where they see connections to their own experience—whether that’s Bloom’s outsider status, the question of nationhood, the acceptance of infidelity, or simply the yes-saying at the end. The production doesn’t demand that you have the “correct” response to Joyce; it makes space for whatever vision of the text you can construct from its fragments. In this sense, ERS’s “Ulysses” functions less like traditional theater and more like a communal reading—everyone in the room encountering the same words but creating their own images, their own meanings, their own relationship to Bloom’s long day.

The seven-person ensemble—Dee Beasnael, Kate Benson, Maggie Hoffman, Vin Knight, Scott Shepherd, Christopher-Rashee Stevenson, and Stephanie Weeks—deserve considerable credit for memorizing what amounts to volumes of Joyce’s prose and navigating the production’s complex structure with apparent ease. But the very nature of ERS’s approach prevents any actor from fully developing a character or demonstrating the deeper conflicts that give Joyce’s novel its emotional weight. Vin Knight’s Leopold Bloom registers as decent and observant, but we never feel the full measure of his compassion or his quiet anguish over Molly’s infidelity. Maggie Hoffman delivers Molly’s final monologue with appropriate earthiness, but her climactic “Yes”—Joyce’s great affirmation of life in all its messy sexuality and contradiction—lands as just another moment in a long evening rather than the revelation it needs to be. The production keeps moving, parsing and demonstrating, but the key emotional moments cannot rise to their full potential because the actors are constantly switching roles, reading text, and serving the mechanics of adaptation rather than inhabiting lives.

Indeed, much of the evening feels less like fully realized theater than like an elaborate first reading of the script—the cast seated behind a long table for extended stretches, occasionally rising to act out a scene before returning to their chairs and pages. This is not necessarily a failure of imagination so much as an honest acknowledgment of the challenge: how do you stage a novel that exists primarily in the rhythm of its language and the interiority of its characters’ thoughts? ERS’s solution is to present the text itself as the spectacle, with the performers as skilled interpreters rather than fully embodied characters. Whether this constitutes theater or something closer to an illustrated lecture—a literary seminar on its feet—remains an open question.

The production’s technical elements support this interpretive approach without calling undue attention to themselves. Marika Kent’s lighting design effectively carves out different spaces and times of day in the Martinson Hall’s intimate configuration, while the periodic use of fog and other atmospheric effects proves serviceable if not particularly memorable. The most striking visual element remains the text itself, scrolling relentlessly on screens at the back of the stage—a constant reminder of everything the production cannot include, everything the audience must imagine or remember or simply accept as absent.

So what, finally, is Elevator Repair Service’s “Ulysses?” It’s neither a solution to Joyce’s famously “unstageable” text nor an obstacle to understanding it. Instead, it’s a retelling—a theatrical encounter with the novel that audience members can tap into at whatever points it connects to their own experience. Those connections might be intellectual (recognizing Joyce’s modernist techniques made visible), thematic (responding to questions of persecution, nationhood, acceptance), or simply the pleasure of hearing Joyce’s language spoken aloud by skilled performers. But the production makes no pretense of replacing the novel or even fully dramatizing it.

This creates an odd paradox in marketing and expectation. ERS has built its reputation on ambitious literary adaptations, most famously Gatz, their eight-hour verbatim staging of “The Great Gatsby.” Audiences arriving at the Public Theater expect theater—characters, conflict, emotional arcs, and the machinery of drama. What they get instead is something closer to performance art or communal reading, an interpretive demonstration that assumes familiarity with its source material even as it ostensibly introduces that material to new audiences. For Joyce devotees, this may be enough—a chance to see their private reading made public, to hear rhythms they’ve only heard in their heads. For general audiences, the experience offers fragments of a narrative, glimmers of themes, and the framework of Bloom’s day, but little of the emotional or dramatic satisfaction that traditional theater provides.

The question of whether that framework is enough depends entirely on what you bring to Martinson Hall and what you’re willing to accept in return. If you can embrace the parsing over embodiment, the demonstration over drama, the interpretive openness over emotional depth, then ERS’s Ulysses offers a smart, playful, occasionally illuminating encounter with one of literature’s monuments. If you’re hoping for theater that moves you, that creates fully realized human beings navigating recognizable conflicts, you may leave admiring the ambition while feeling the absence of what Joyce’s novel, for all its difficulty, actually provides: the beating heart beneath the modernist experiment.