Review: A ‘Ulysses’ That Squeezes Bloomsday Into 2 Hours, 40 Minutes

Looking at the stage as you enter the Luma theater, the smaller of the auditoriums at Bard College’s Fisher Center, you might think your ticket had been switched with one for a zoning board meeting. Enjoy the splendor of chairs lined up behind three conjoined conference tables! Admire the care with which pens, stacks of paper and wee bottles of water have been laid like dinner settings! Warily consult the large clock on the upstage wall that offers the real time — at least at first.

And wonder whether this thing called “Ulysses” can possibly capture, in a reading, the richness of Joyce’s gargantuan novel about everything under the sun and also in the dark.

With caveats, it can. The Elevator Repair Service production, playing at Bard through July 14, somehow manages to reduce the novel’s more than 260,000 words to 2 hours and 40 minutes with much of its humor, pathos and bawdiness intact. It’s not the complete text, of course; for that you must spend 24 hours at a Bloomsday marathon, during which even the readers may fall asleep.

Instead, the edition used here, though verbatim, is highly intermittent. When each of its hundreds of cuts occurs, we hear the squeal of sped-up tape, and we see the seven cast members blown back in their chairs as if by a strong wind of gibberish.

Still, this redacted “Ulysses” manages to touch down for at least a brief visit in each of the novel’s 18 episodes. These are roughly modeled on the ones in Homer’s “Odyssey” — Ulysses being the Latin name for Odysseus. But instead of tracing the watery wanderings of that Trojan War hero on his 10-year journey home to faithful Penelope, Joyce traces the bibulous wanderings of a Dublin ad canvasser named Leopold Bloom on a daylong journey back to his cheating wife, Molly.