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Elevator Repair Service 
Adapts Ulysses

2024; The MIT Press; Volume: 46; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1162/pajj_a_00697

1537-9477

John Collins, Scott T.C. Shepherd,

American and British Literature Analysis

Founded in 1991 by John Collins and a small group of actors, Elevator Repair Service Theater has dedicated itself to staging all manner of texts, including and especially those that were never meant for the stage. Of all of those odd sources, literature emerged as a favorite starting point in the early 2000s and has since become a calling card. In 2004, ERS embarked on a multi-year project to stage the entire text of The Great Gatsby. That eight-hour production, Gatz, which went on to be presented in over a dozen countries around the world, would redefine the company and introduce it to a vastly expanded audience. The production was honored with numerous awards and ran for a total of eighteen weeks at The Public Theater. In the ensuing years, ERS developed other performances of verbatim text from early twentieth-century novels. The Sound and the Fury (2008) presented the uncut first chapter of Faulkner's novel. The Select (2011), a staging of Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, made some abridgments but used the author's text exclusively. In each project, ERS eschewed conventional methods of literary adaptation and sought creative solutions to make theatre from the words, as written, without interpolations or rewrites. In 2019, the company was approached by New York City's Symphony Space, home for forty years to "Bloomsday on Broadway," an annual celebration of James Joyce's Ulysses featuring readings by actors and cultural luminaries. Symphony Space proposed that ERS create a project for Bloomsday 2022 to mark the hundredth anniversary of the book's publication. ERS director John Collins and actor and co-director Scott Shepherd collaborated on a plan to stage the entire novel, with the seemingly impossible requirement that the production run less than two hours.Over seven hundred pages long and notoriously difficult, Ulysses follows the wanderings of Leopold Bloom, an ad broker, around Dublin on June 16, 1904. Bloom is staying away from home to allow his wife Molly, a locally admired soprano, to have a sexual encounter with her concert promoter. Bloom develops a fatherly concern for Stephen Dedalus, a poet, who has come home for his mother's funeral. Very loosely modeled on Homer's Odyssey, the novel is composed of eighteen "episodes" that vary radically in style. A free-flowing stream-of-consciousness technique dominates, in which dialogue, narrative, and private thoughts are sometimes impossible to disentangle.On March 16, 2023, in New York City, Collins and Shepherd sat down to discuss the book and how they approached turning it into theatre.■COLLINS: Kathy Landau [Symphony Space's executive director] proposed Ulysses to ERS in 2019. We went up there and sat down in the little café and they said, "Why don't you guys do something for Bloomsday? You could do Ulysses!"SHEPHERD: Let's get ERS, that company that does novels.COLLINS: I guess so, yeah. We had never worked with them before, but it seemed like a reasonable enough assumption that we might have some interest in a project like that. And I did. I was making a beautifully uninformed decision, because the amount of Ulysses that I had read up to that point was almost none. I mean, I knew what it was. I'm sure I'd made some attempt to read it, but otherwise just knew it by reputation and mostly thought of it as a book that was just way too dense, way too long. I think I knew that it took place on a single day. All that made it very easy for me to say, yeah, this seems like a wonderfully impossible thing to do.SHEPHERD: And that's what you always go for, in theory.COLLINS: In theory, right. That was what motivated us to do the complete text of The Great Gatsby—because that seemed impossible. We were wrong about that, but after fifteen years of experience with The Great Gatsby, I think I can confidently say that it is actually impossible to do all of Ulysses on stage. We went into this knowing that it would be impossible to do the whole thing, and that it would force us to come up with some compelling creative solution to the problem that the novel gave us.SHEPHERD: You like to be up against something you don't know how to deal with, and you knew that you couldn't deal with Ulysses the way that we dealt with The Great Gatsby.COLLINS: You could have just stopped right there: "You knew that you couldn't deal with Ulysses." Actually, I didn't know yet that I couldn't deal with Ulysses. I found out later that I just couldn't deal with Ulysses. But when did I first bring this to you?SHEPHERD: Probably not too long after you made the decision. When we talked the first time, it seemed like something that you had just agreed to. And you were like, "Can you read the book and—"COLLINS: "Can you go read this book for me and just, you know, give me some ideas?"SHEPHERD: I don't know if you knew what my experience with the book had been up to that point.COLLINS: I did not.SHEPHERD: I had read it in college with the expectation of having it explained to me. And that didn't happen.COLLINS: I remember this story. You were assigned the book over the summer for a course in the fall. So you read it, and then they canceled the course.SHEPHERD: They didn't cancel the course, but they changed the book to Lewis and Carroll . . . Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass.COLLINS: Lewis and Carroll through the Louisiana Purchase.SHEPHERD: Because the course was not about Ulysses, it was about literary theory. And the professor decided he had used Ulysses as the example text too many times. But a lucky result of that was, it helped me push through the entire book without getting discouraged.COLLINS: It didn't matter if you didn't understand something. Somebody was going to swoop in and tell you what you had read.SHEPHERD: But then they didn't. And then sometime after college, I don't remember why, I gave it another go.COLLINS: Probably for a similar reason. It seems like an unclimbable mountain. So why not try it?SHEPHERD: It's a famous mountain in the landscape of world literature.COLLINS: And it has an aura of greatness. When we were in Zurich and I asked Fritz Senn [director of the Joyce Foundation in Zurich], "What was Joyce was up to, why did he do this?" His answer was that Joyce wanted to make something great. That's an objective fact about this book. It is great. It is massive. It's written in so many different styles. Something you can't read in twenty-four hours takes place over less than twenty-four hours. Early on in this process we were talking about theories of infinity. I thought maybe there was some way into this in thinking about infinity. I was obsessed with those paradoxes.SHEPHERD: Zeno's paradox.COLLINS: Zeno's paradox. And what is it called—limiting infinity and infinite infinity. There's infinite divisibility infinity and then just going on and on forever infinity.SHEPHERD: Countable and uncountable infinity is how I remember it. From that mathematician Cantor.COLLINS: Yeah, that probably describes it better than "going-on-forever" infinity.SHEPHERD: But infinite divisibility is the hookup with Zeno. Because the infinitely divisible line—COLLINS: You go half the distance to the goal, then half the remaining distance, then half the remaining distance. And you never get there.SHEPHERD: That's the uncountable infinity. The infinity of whole numbers, one, two, three, four, five, is the countable one.COLLINS: In trying to identify something fundamental about the book, that was what I thought of early on: the seeming infinity of the details of the moments in that day.SHEPHERD: One day in a modern city can fill this giant book, because no matter how close you go in, there's more detail. Like one of those images made of fractals, and you get closer and it's more fractals. I think infinite divisibility was behind our first idea of staging a single page.COLLINS: Right. We were talking about radical, unexpected strategies for claiming the totality of the novel in a short performance. We were looking to extremes, and one extreme was that we would just do a page and let that page last an hour and a half. But we didn't stick with that idea very long because it's too hard to find a single representative bit of this novel.SHEPHERD: It changes too much.COLLINS: You've got all those different styles, and the progression through the city of the main characters, Stephen and Bloom . . . There would be too many things that the one page just couldn't include.SHEPHERD: And the book is always cross-referencing itself. You can't get that in a single page either.COLLINS: Then a Brian De Palma trailer finds its way into the conversation.SHEPHERD: Femme Fatale. With Antonio Banderas and Rebecca Romijn-Stamos. I never saw the movie, but—COLLINS: Sure you did.SHEPHERD: Oh yeah, I saw the whole movie.COLLINS: Several times.SHEPHERD: Because the trailer is the entire movie, played in fast forward. And every once in a while, it slows down to give you a little teaser of a scene.COLLINS: One of our thought experiments on how to approach the novel must have reminded you of that. We were asking ourselves, "How can we do the whole thing? Let's not let anyone say we didn't do the entire novel!" But with the requirement that it not last longer than an hour and a half. We'll probably fail to accomplish that in the final version. But two hours—we can make that work. The trailer kind of cemented the idea that we could do the whole thing with fast-forwarding. So that's when you started to look through and try to find the passages that best represented each chapter.SHEPHERD: A passage from each chapter that's about a page long, and in some sense stands on its own, and once you've got it, do you feel like, yeah, this does a pretty good job of representing this episode.COLLINS: We wanted to somehow emulate the experience of reading all of those episodes, with all those different styles.SHEPHERD: Like a sampler plate with all the different flavors.COLLINS: So, we spend a lot of time talking, we do a little book club on Zoom, and we finally do some work in the summer of 2021 in the big empty theatre at Symphony Space and make a short video. We had a few fun sections picked out, including a messy food scene where Bloom looks into a restaurant and is disgusted by the men eating inside. We put everybody at a table. There was an idea that this might be some sort of panel of scholars or experts who were gathered to read the novel or discuss it.SHEPHERD: We knew we were going to be doing this for Symphony Space's Bloomsday, and we thought we might present it in a panel discussion format. What we did in 2021 was pretty short. We only did four or five sections.COLLINS: That's right. Armed with only that much experience of staging it, we went to Basel. David Zinn had designed a set that was a kind of guess, because it had to be submitted way before we knew what we were staging. He created a perfect replica of our New York City rehearsal space, sliced in half and placed diagonally on the stage at Theater Basel. Inside that he placed five study carrels he'd copied from a library somewhere. That led us to an idea that these five people on stage were students. Or it was a study group or a book club.SHEPHERD: Some kind of meet-up group. The re-creation of that scrappy rehearsal space really suggested a self-organized group. People are meeting in this room that doesn't seem very official.COLLINS: Some place that was available for their strange meeting. And we had a kind of narrator figure who we didn't explicitly identify as James Joyce, but who started the performance with the quote of Joyce, about puzzles.SHEPHERD: He said, "I've put in so many puzzles and enigmas that it'll keep the scholars arguing for centuries over what I meant."COLLINS: So, we set it up with him addressing the group that way, as if it were a sort of challenge to solve those puzzles.SHEPHERD: We were posing the centuries that the professors were going to be arguing against the hour and a half that we had to put on the show.COLLINS: But one of the main takeaways from our experience in Basel was that the more involved we got with the book, the more we missed things that were getting excluded by our contiguous text idea.SHEPHERD: Dropping in on a continuous page, just to sample the texture of the writing, worked well on paper. But when you're in a theatre watching people on stage, you need more. You want to know who the people are and to understand their relationships.COLLINS: Somewhere in the back of my mind, that's what I was anticipating all along, that sooner or later whatever idea we put down on paper was going to have to withstand the scrutiny of an audience. And our own scrutiny, with an audience in mind, or with a theatrical experience in mind. There are things that your brain just wants, unconsciously, from what you're seeing. Even early on in Basel, we found that there were things we couldn't leave out. I remember specifically adding the appearance of the ghost of Steven's mother.SHEPHERD: I think that's the first break we made from the contiguous selection rule. You guys did that without me. I was still in New York with Covid, and I would call in at five in the morning.COLLINS: Just what you want to be doing when you're suffering from Covid.SHEPHERD: And you were already dealing with a sense of loss about what was missing.COLLINS: Of course, it's the problem that anyone is going to face staging any kind of literature—in any way other than the do-every-single-word-of-it approach. When we were working on Gatsby, we just decided early on that we didn't want to have that problem. The ridiculous, impossible choice we made was to not cut anything. We were trying to achieve a similar kind of integrity with Ulysses by taking one clean, unedited sample from each episode. And we couldn't do it.SHEPHERD: But editing is a dangerous game, because once you decide you're going to go through and pick out what's "necessary," you're imposing your own judgment, and you might be very wrong about what details are essential. What details make this what it is.COLLINS: You're placing yourself in a position of greater authority than the author himself. That's always going to be problematic.SHEPHERD: And it's particularly problematic with this book, whose program seems to be about including, including, including.COLLINS: Radical inclusion.SHEPHERD: And including a lot of things that aren't normally in books. Or don't normally make their way into literature. As soon as you start removing the unnecessary things, you're taking away its essence. Possibly.COLLINS: When we were working on The Sun Also Rises, we focused on the dialogue. It seemed like the dialogue was almost a play within the novel. I didn't feel much guilt or sadness about cutting Hemingway's long, wordy descriptions of landscapes out the window of a train. But here, Joyce confounds any plans you might have for editing him just by the sheer variety of things he has chosen to include.SHEPHERD: He complicates dialogue too, because he's constantly blurring distinctions between what's spoken and what's narration and what's thoughts.COLLINS: That was a particular challenge we were dealing with: how to manage the fluidity of his prose going between the most internal first-person perspective and completely objective third-person perspective, often within a paragraph, sometimes mid-sentence, and without too many clues. He didn't always use quotation marks.SHEPHERD: In Ulysses, basically never.COLLINS: When we finished our production in Basel, we had a different idea about how to choose text. We came back to New York and had six months before we had to show a full-length piece for Bloomsday at Symphony Space. You created a new version of each episode.SHEPHERD: It was work we had already started doing in Basel. Let's help the audience follow certain threads: Rudy, the child Bloom and Molly lost; the orbits of Bloom and Stephen, the near-misses where they cross paths but don't meet—COLLINS: It started to seem clear to us that despite the maddening multiplicity of the book, there were key things that kept coming back. Some were memories: for Stephen, his mother who had died; for Bloom, the son who had died eleven days after he was born. Those two ghosts haunt the whole novel.SHEPHERD: There's something else that died with Rudy, in the relationship between Bloom and Molly. So, we trace, for example, the sweater that Molly knits for Rudy to be buried in. It's mentioned across several chapters. And a moment of lost passion from early in their relationship that Bloom recalls in the afternoon and that we get from Molly's point of view later that night. Trying to pick out these places where the book makes connections to itself.COLLINS: Those connections seemed more and more important as we worked. Or they seemed like an opportunity, a hidden structure in the text. Another storyline is Molly's affair with Blazes Boylan. That's the thing that is actually happening during this day. That's why Bloom chooses to spend so much time away from home. Bloom's day begins and ends with Molly. It begins with her waking up and them chatting. He notices the envelope that she's hiding from him. That's when he understands that Boylan's going to be coming over and that they're going to have sex in his bed. Then he sees Boylan around town a couple of times.SHEPHERD: I'm glad you're talking about that because I've been thinking that's something we could get more of.COLLINS: Mm.SHEPHERD: Or follow that thread a little more with Boylan. Maybe he appears when she gets the letter. Since we've got this guy that we can sort of—COLLINS: Right, and we've got a great actor playing him, who would probably enjoy playing him some more in some more scenes.SHEPHERD: It would just be a gift to the audience to give them more of that actor.COLLINS: More of that actor doing that ridiculous dance across the stage with his stupid hat on.SHEPHERD: No, because the other place I was thinking about is at the end of— See, we're working, right here.COLLINS: Yeah, this is, it's happening. The work is happening right here and now.SHEPHERD: At the end of chapter eight, there's an encounter with Boylan. Bloom escapes into the library because he sees Boylan on the street. I don't know, I've just been thinking, are we really delivering to the audience the understanding of what's happening with Boylan, legibly enough.COLLINS: When you sample in the way that we're sampling, the references can be almost cryptic, or not explicit.SHEPHERD: Well, there's a crypticness to the book itself.COLLINS: That's its language. It's interesting because of all these infinitely divisible moments and pedestrian observations in the Boylan subplot has urgency to it. That is an event that is very much tied to real time, because he's expecting him to be there at four o'clock in the afternoon. In the morning it's set up: Bloom's got to get out of the house. Then he has these nervous encounters with Boylan: they see him outside the cab on the way to the funeral, he ends up in the same restaurant. It's suspenseful almost. And then in the end it's a lot of what Molly talks about—or thinks about. The Boylan subplot is a key element of what's going on, and it has taken us until today to really seriously decide to pursue it further.SHEPHERD: Well, it's because we made our priority something about texture, and about language and form, and that was a deliberate decision not to reduce everything to plot, or not to prioritize events.COLLINS: That was something that we consciously resisted, because that sounded to us like how you make a bad adaptation: you ignore what makes it unique and just look for a simple plot, which this novel really resists. It allows itself to be constantly distracted from its plot. But those basic events do hold the novel together. It's almost like a short story multiplied itself into a really long novel by simply not limiting the number of details that could accrue around any particular point in that simple plot.SHEPHERD: One thing the book manages to do is give you the characters' entire lives in the course of a single day. Not like a movie does when it shows you a past event in a flashback. The past is involved in every moment of the present.COLLINS: You're dragging it with you through everything you do. We don't neatly pause and rewind to tell you some backstory.SHEPHERD: Every moment is soaked in the backstory.COLLINS: If you and everybody are hauling around a consciousness that contains all these memories and experiences, normal daily life has a way of sparking profound free association. It's the accrual of things that eventually starts to tell you something about that character. I think the novel has been described as a literary illustration of thought, but I'm beginning to think it's an illustration of consciousness. Not just what you're thinking about and how you're thinking about it, but how your memories can transform those little observations and affect your behavior.SHEPHERD: Your whole experience constitutes the filter or the apparatus through which you receive what's happening to you now.COLLINS: And you can't disentangle any of those things. I guess that's the beautiful proposal of the novel, that inside one's head there's no obvious hierarchy of thought. There's a constant interplay between your internal memories and consciousness and the outside world as it comes in through your eyes and ears.SHEPHERD: The interplay between them is completely porous, which Joyce is always showing with his style: he's constantly flowing, without indications in the punctuation, between personal experience and narrated facts and speech and thought.COLLINS: What has finally, I think, revealed itself to be our assignment is to find an analogue for that literary idea of consciousness, in the medium of live theatre. Joyce has found a way to push the envelope in terms of literature, but everything he's doing is very literary.SHEPHERD: Should we talk about the teleprompter?COLLINS: Well, we had a short time to rework our idea onto the Symphony Space stage in 2022, so a practical decision we made was to use our teleprompter. That way we could start staging the scenes without anyone having to look down at a book or a script. This was software that you created for our Measure for Measure production. The teleprompter became a pretty important tool when we got back to work on this, and then, a little bit by accident, it became part of the concept. You introduced the performance at Symphony Space and told the audience that there was a screen at the back of the room that we would be reading from, and it would have the entire novel on it.SHEPHERD: Which was true.COLLINS: When we fast-forwarded, it would actually race through that text. Of course, now I've just sent out an email to the cast saying, "please stop relying on the teleprompter and learn your lines." But now we've come up against a new problem: how do we preserve what the teleprompter gave us? There was something very satisfying about the actors appearing to be controled by this thing they were trying to read. That's something we don't want to lose. It's a way of giving the novel itself a role. There's a huge, intimidating thing that these people have come together to try to navigate, and they're not in control. It's a ride that these seven actors are on.SHEPHERD: And the locus of power, the thing that's controling them, is the book itself.COLLINS: This will be the fourth novel that we've put on stage. Since we did The Great Gatsby, we've had our mantra of "Let the book be a book." We want to preserve the bookness of the book, even as we perform it on stage.SHEPHERD: The book is still present. It's not that something's been extracted and the book is a husk that gets thrown away.COLLINS: There's a tension between what you can do on stage and what you can do in a novel, and we want to foreground that tension. We don't ever want to forget that we're trying to shove a square peg through a round hole, and the chaos of shavings flying off as we shove the peg in there is part of the experience of our play.SHEPHERD: The fast-forward idea takes us off the hook, or it gives the audience permission to give us permission. They don't need the glue between one thing and the next.COLLINS: We're not asking them to evaluate what we're doing as a coherent, perfectly formed replacement for the novel. It's always going to be an imperfect, broken attempt to do the impossible.SHEPHERD: It's also consistent with an idea of consciousness that we were talking about before. You don't get the backstory as flashback. You get fragments along the way and you piece it together. I still think of it as a kind of trailer, a teaser for the novel.COLLINS: Right. Two hours instead of two minutes. The Femme Fatale trailer was two minutes, and I'm guessing the movie was probably—SHEPHERD: An hour and a half to two hours. Probably two?COLLINS: A minute per hour. One sixtieth. I wonder how that compares to our ratio.SHEPHERD: The radio play of the entire book was twenty-eight hours.COLLINS: Sounds like we're doing more.SHEPHERD: Sounds like we need to tighten this thing. It needs to be about twenty-eight minutes to have the same ratio.COLLINS: Really? Oh, God. All right, back to the drawing board.