Ulysses is long (my copy of James Joyce’s novel reaches nearly 700 pages) and the Elevator Repair Service’s new stage version (including intermission) runs close to three hours, so let’s be brief (as possible) about reviewing the production that opened tonight at the Public Theater as an event in the Under the Radar festival.
A remarkable company, ERS creates unusual new works—notably among them, adaptations of modernist novels, most famously Gatz, a day-long verbatim rendition of The Great Gatsby in its entirety. Others are The Sound and the Fury (April Seventh, 1928) drawn from a single chapter of that novel and The Select (The Sun Also Rises). This series continues with Ulysses, Joyce’s incredibly rich, wildly complex epic regarding a 1904 day in the life of Leopold Bloom as he rambles about Dublin.
ERS founder John Collins directs the company-created piece with co-direction and dramaturgy by Scott Shepherd, who Gatz fans remember fondly as Nick Carraway. Like the six other actors in this two-act staging, Shepherd depicts several characters. Shepherd genially introduces the show, noting the novel’s countless enigmas and puzzles and how “every reading of Ulysses is a misreading,” and remarks that the fast-paced ERS version has been created in the same cheerful spirit “of continuing the confusion and controversy that Joyce obviously intended.”
What follows is not Ulysses so much as Greatest Hits From Ulysses as the actors fast-forward through the story. Choice bits of text offer the ensemble juicy opportunities to showcase their craft. The chronological zaps between excerpts are evoked amusingly by the designers while a large clock in the rear recalibrates the times. Performing within mostly chiaroscuro environs, adding and subtracting telling bits of period clothes as they go, the actors are wonderfully adept in their lovingly detailed quick renderings of the Dubliners who appear along Bloom’s path. Their approach to the characters tends to be more brightly comic than natural. The director and sound designer Ben Williams manipulate a smorgasbord of echoes, reverb, and aural effects to delineate voices during especially heightened passages such as the honky-tonk Nighttown sequence.
Depicting the middle-aged Bloom as a generally anxious though amiable fellow, Vin Knight sports a bowler hat, a houndstooth waistcoat, and, curiously, a long dark skirt over garish green socks. The subtleties of Bloom’s costume elude me, but then so does plenty of Joyce’s ever-challenging novel. Strangers to Ulysses may simply want to sit back and enjoy the performances as they occur—like admiring the portraits in a madhouse Dublin gallery—and not worry about the narrative. Along with Knight and Shepherd, the capable, frequently delightful, members of the ERS ensemble are Dee Beasnael, Kate Benson, Maggie Hoffman, Christopher-Rashee Stevenson, and Stephanie Weeks.
Viewers conversant with the text may be surprised by which sections and folk are highlighted or skipped in this nimbly paced rendition, but that can be fun for Joyce devotees and former English majors. Plenty to talk about afterward. Like the novel, this Ulysses is best enjoyed in patches rather than as a whole. Although Ulysses remains too big a monster for the stage, let’s hope ERS tackles other modernist masterpieces. Are they taking requests? How about Zuleika Dobson, Max Beerbohm’s miniature classic about the Edwardian beauty who killed all those nice university boys?
Ulysses opened Jan. 25, 2026 at the Public Theater and runs through March 1. Tickets and information: publictheater.org
