(suspenseful music) (audience chattering) - [Announcer] Welcome everyone, to the Penny Stamps Distinguished Speaker series.

(audience applauding) - Welcome to the Penny Stamps Distinguished Speaker series.

My name's Chrisstina Hamilton, the series director, and today we present Elevator Repair Service, with a big thank you to our longtime extraordinary partner, the University Musical Society, or UMS with additional support from Detroit PBS, PBS Books, WNET All Arts, and Michigan Public 91.7 FM.

Today is just at the beginning of our guests' visit to Ann Arbor as they are in fact here to take on James Joyce's "Ulysses", the Mount Everest of 20th century literature which has fascinated, perplexed, and scandalized readers for over a century now.

They are bringing it to the stage of the Power Center this weekend on Saturday and Sunday.

And if you do not already have tickets, you better hurry up and get those that are remaining.

You can go to ums.org and for students in the house, remember you get specially priced student tickets, so do not miss it.

Please do remember to turn off your cell phones.

Take a break from your technology for a moment.

And due to the fact that there is a dress rehearsal this evening following the talk here, we are not gonna have time for a Q&A.

However, there will be a Q&A and a with the artists at a talk back after the show on Saturday, so more incentive to get those tickets.

Before we bring folks out, a few words of introduction to get us grounded here today.

Firstly, Elevator Repair Service or ERS.

This is a New York City based company that creates original works for live theater with an ongoing ensemble.

It shows are created from a wide range of texts that include found transcripts of trials and debates, literature, classical dramas and new plays.

ERS, they've created an extensive body of work that includes 20 original pieces.

These have earned the company a loyal following and made it one of New York's most highly acclaimed experimental theater companies.

They're best known for Gatz, which is based on a verbatim staging of the entire text of "The Great Gatsby".

And they have received numerous awards and distinctions, including Lortel Awards, a Bassey Award, and an Obie Award for sustained excellence.

And now to the players at hand, John Collins is the director who founded Elevator Repair Service in 1991.

Since then, he's directed or co-directed all of the company's productions, while also serving as the company's artistic director.

The company's work under his direction has been seen in a dozen countries and cities across the United States.

Recent projects include Baldwin and Buckley at Cambridge and a new adaptation of Chekhov's "The Seagull".

John is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a US artist Fellowship, and a Doris Duke performing Artist Award.

Scott Shepherd, who will be on stage here as well, has been a member of ERS since 1994 when he played a drunk, passed out on a radiator in McGurk, a Cautionary Tale.

He's appeared in many of ERS's shows.

Measure for Measure, Gatz, No Great Society, Total Fiction Lie, Cab Legs and Shut Up I Tell You.

He's worked also at the Worcester Group since 1997 and his screen credits is quite a long list, folks, and you probably will remember him from Killers of the Flower Moon, The Last of Us, First Cow, El Camino.

True detective, the Young Pope or Bridge of Spies.

And for today's will be a conversation as you can see, to lead the conversation, we bring back to the penny stamp series Stage Tom Seller, a writer, dramature, curator, editor of Yale's International Theater Journal, Theater, and Professor of Dramaturg and dramatic criticism at Yale.

Now, before I invite these folks to the stage, but before I invite all of them, I'm gonna ask you to help me with a little something, and actually I'm gonna invite Tom Sellers to come out and join me here.

Hi Tom.

(people clapping) - Hi Chrisstina.

- So today is, you know, it's always someone's birthday, right?

- It is.

- And today actually is Rita Hayworth's birthday, and today is also Eminem's birthday.

And it's also John Collins' birthday.

So I think, you know, this man's been very hard at work.

He forgot that it was his birthday today 'cause he's just been in rehearsal now he is talking to you then he is going to rehearsal.

So let's celebrate a moment for him.

Andy, maybe you could help us out.

Let's all sing him happy birthday as we bring him on to the stage.

- Welcome John Collins and Scott Checker.

- Yes, let's.

♪ Happy birthday to you ♪ ♪ Happy birthday to you ♪ ♪ Happy birthday dear John ♪ ♪ Happy birthday to you ♪ (audience clapping) (audience cheering) - That's never happened to me before.

- Well John, you're one of the hardest working men in show business and we thought you deserved a moment to celebrate your birthday today, sir.

- To put me at ease as soon as I come up.

- Well, happy birthday John, and welcome Scott.

You both have a lot going on right now.

As Christina just mentioned, your remounting your epic show "Gatz" at the public theater in New York, which is a six hour marathon version of F Scott Fitzgerald's, The Great Gatsby.

- It's about six and a half hours of theater, of actual theater and then an hour and a half of breaks.

- Right.

(people laughing) - The dinner in the middle of the day, that's about an hour.

And then two 15 minute breaks on either end.

It's done in four quarters, like a football game.

- Yeah, awesome.

And simultaneously you are preparing "Ulysses", another massive project for presentation here this weekend.

So that is just a huge amount of work.

- Yeah.

- Either one would be a feat, but two together is really something.

So I wanna get to "Ulysses", but before we do that, I wanted to talk a little bit about the company and about your work in it.

John, ERS just celebrated its 30th year, well just, celebrated its 30th year in 2021.

So that would now make you 33.

- That's right.

- A mysterious age.

Can you just tell us a little bit about why and how you founded Elevator Repair Service back in 91 and the inevitable question?

What's the story behind the name?

- Okay, should I do that one first.

- Please.

- Well, that does kind of come first.

The story behind the name.

There's nothing very clever behind it, I promise.

It was when I was about 11 years old, I think I took a test designed to help, it was like a survey, lots of questions, multiple choice questions designed to help unemployed adults figure out what job they were best suited to apply for.

And, you know, I did it very sincerely and answered all the questions as honestly as I could.

You know, do you like technology?

Do you like to work with your hands?

Do you like to work alone?

Do you like to work with other people?

Somehow all of my answers generated the response of you should be an elevator repairman.

So that was kind of when I first moved to New York and I used to have temp jobs and I would meet a good friend of mine from college who helped me form found the company.

And we would eat lunch outside these big bank buildings where we were working and sort of fantasize about having a theater company.

And he would say, well, you know, if we have a theater company, we have to name it Elevator Repair Service 'cause we have to make this come true that that's your destiny.

And so reluctantly I agreed for our first couple of shows to do them under that name and we couldn't shake it.

So 33 years later, we still have that ridiculous name.

- And why did you start your company?

- Well, you know, I was very young.

I mean, just out of school.

And I think, you know, part of the reason was actually a lack of ambition.

I didn't see myself, you know, being some kind of a tour or I couldn't even imagine myself sitting behind a table and auditioning people.

I just didn't feel qualified to do any of that stuff.

But what I did know that I wanted to do was work with a small group of people who I knew and trusted and who were just willing to play.

There were already ideas we had at that point, a small group of us that we just wanted to try out.

And we didn't know anybody would come to see them, but that felt like a very comfortable way to start working, especially to start working in a kind of experimental way.

And we were working in tiny little theaters with, you know, 30 or 40 seats down in basements.

And so it started very small, but that turned out to be a very good way to start this kind of endeavor because we had this sort of anonymity and a lot of freedom to fail and try things in that sort of, in that obscurity that we had and started to develop an aesthetic and a kind of shared sense of humor and sort of shared goals, I guess.

And I was very comfortable working in an ensemble like that.

And I was very inspired at that age by the Worcester Group and another company from New York that whose work I loved and that I had read about and I read that they made their work as an ensemble and so I wanted to do that 'cause maybe my work could look like theirs if I did.

- And Scott, you also work with that ensemble, the Worcester group as well as ERS.

How did you make your way into ERS and how did you and John start working together?

- Ultimate Frisbee.

- Frisbee's the answer.

- Yeah, I was going to this Frisbee game.

I mean, it's not really true.

Like I actually know John, John and I went to the same camp when we were in high school, but we never met each other.

- [Speaker] Right.

- But we had, I was a theater minor and he was a theater major, and so had seen each other's play, you know, shows, so.

- [John] Go ahead, tell him what I was doing.

- You were a mime, John was in a play where like, he wasn't really one of the characters in the play.

He was in these sort of interstitial, what were they, like, sort of transitional.

- [John] Yeah.

- Moments that sort of explained something about what had just happened or what was about to happen.

And it was done in mime and you had like the white makeup and everything.

- [John] I can't believe I made you say that.

- Well, yeah, I was gonna skip it.

- [John] It's a dark secret and I was.

- Just aired it secret, it's your birthday.

I wasn't gonna, but so, and then I had a friend who had worked with you, Steve Boto, who, you know, I had met a couple of years ago and he was like, you gotta come check out this company that I'm working with, Elevator Repair Service.

And I went to a show, it was called Language Instruction, Love Family versus Andy Kaufman.

And I was like, I don't know what this is, But I am loving it.

You know, it is sort of like where the thing where you're sort of like laughing and you don't know why.

And so I was really jazzed about it, but I didn't approach them or anything.

Like I just heard about this Frisbee game that was happening on Sundays in Central Park and that a lot of those guys happened to be there and they were working on a new show by that time called "McGirk, A Cautionary Tale".

And in that show there was a guy in the company who looked a lot like me.

They were all, everybody was always talking about like, oh, that guy Scott, he looks just like Leo.

And then in the show they were working on, they were still kind of writing the story and they thought it would be funny if Leo got fired from.

- His character.

- His character got fired in the show and was replaced by that guy who looks just like him from Frisbee.

(people laughing) So that's when I got asked to be in a show.

And so for that show, that's the show where I was passed out on a radiator for the first 20 minutes of the piece until they fired Leo and then I put on his costume.

- So you've both spent the better part of the last three decades working in ensemble situations, John mostly with the RS, Scott with the RS and the Worcester group.

And I'm wondering what that means to you to work in an ensemble situation.

I mean, John, you mentioned the freedom to fail.

- Yeah.

- But what about working that way is attractive to you?

I mean, is it more collaborative than other kinds?

- I mean, I did get to work with the Worcester group myself for 14 years and it overlapped with a lot of the early years of ERS and it was kind of like, to me it was like graduate school because I was a sound designer and a technician for that company, but I got to observe Elizabeth Lacompt, the director and the ensemble and I got to just see what incredible freedom she had and what she gave herself.

And, you know, sometimes that meant she always felt like she had freedom to change a show completely an hour before an audience came in, which was harrowing if you're a technician or you know, a designer or an actor I guess.

But I was so inspired by a kind of openness and a kind of gameness among the performers and everybody in the room.

So that just felt comfortable in a situation like that.

I felt at home in a situation like that.

It felt very insulated and protected.

And I guess that's a major advantage as far as I'm concerned of working this way.

You develop a kind of shared language and a trust among that group of people.

And like I said before, it really gives you the freedom to try things that might not work.

You know, you're not always having to plan according to what you know is gonna work or what you think you know is gonna work.

You do things.

And that sort of became the ERSMO was, we're just gonna try something and see what happens.

And that's a thing you can do inside of an ensemble.

I think that is unique, - Yeah, I mean I think that gameness that you're talking about where you can decide like you're gonna change something radically on the night is about that trust.

And the trust only gets developed when you know people for a long enough and you know, on a regular show, you get cast and you gotta sort of suss out all the different people and figure out your place in the group and decide whether you agree aesthetically with people or not.

Do you know what I mean?

There's all this stuff that you get to skip if it's a bunch of people you have developed a relationship with over a series of shows, a series of years, you can sort of, you can develop a kind of theory or a kind of taste together and then sort of you're sort of working a little further down the line of development than you can when you're just all new people.

And I mean, I'm maybe just saying in a different way what you're saying, you can also, because in an ordinary situation, you're getting a bunch of people together who don't know each other and you have a very short amount of time to rehearse, you know, four or five weeks to put a show together.

And so for that reason, in order for that to work, certain practices have been established for how to get a show up in four weeks.

And that leads to a kind of conventional, a set of conventional practices, which deliver results, but in a way sort of similar results or it's hard to get out of that unless you are with a bunch of people who are willing to be out on a limb and not know what you're doing.

- It kind of comes down, I mean, to me, what it came down to in a way was the planned, you know, the the requirement of planning and having a plan in place, which I think is, you know, another way of describing those conventions and being able to embrace and lean into the unplanned.

As a college student, I was beginning to notice that the things that I loved most about being in plays, you know, even in those situations where you didn't really know everybody very well, you still, you know, amazing accidents would happen in rehearsal.

You know, you would stumble on something, you would find something, but if it didn't fit the plan and if there wasn't time to change the plan, then those things just got cast aside.

And I really wanted to make a kind of theater where maybe you have a plan, but it only gets exciting when the plans fall apart and the unplanned things start happening and those things inspire your creativity.

- Well, just to give a glimpse of some of the results of those discoveries, we have a video clip that was made for the anniversary a couple of years ago, which might just convey a little bit of the many facets of ERS.

So we'll just play that, watch this age on screen.

You can watch them age.

- Yes, my dear, now.

(people laughing) - You gotta have a pimp and you gotta look like you're in show business, 'cause if you don't, you're not gonna make it.

(upbeat music) - I don't know.

(upbeat music) Argument, the Seventh Circuit, the state repeated this point over and over again, now.

(upbeat music) (upbeat music) - So as you can see, we like to throw paper and get in fights.

- So those signature dances too.

It brings back a lot of memories.

I think the first show I saw, people were throwing a thermos at each other and then dancing and it had something to do with ISIS or something like that.

- That was, yeah.

- Well you can see the zany side from the video.

But your best known productions really are centered around reading or acts of reading.

So I wanted to talk about that a little bit, reading and entire novel by Faulkner or Hemingway, Joyce, F Scott Fitzgerald as sort of foundations of a theater piece.

And you don't adapt those novels into drama exactly.

It's not a dramatic adaptation, but there are original pieces that center reading and staging its dimensions in other ways.

You've also done pieces that involved reading verbatim from Supreme Court oral arguments.

You've used debate transcripts from James Baldwin and William F. Buckley.

So what is it about the act of reading that excites you?

Do you consider reading sort of intrinsically theatrical?

- Well, in a way I think it's interesting to us because it's just the opposite.

It's in some ways the least theatrical thing when you read by yourself, it's all happening completely, it's very still, it's silent, it's in your head.

So I think it's a, I think for a while now we've been kind of excited about what happens to anything that's read out loud and that I think there is intrinsic theater there and it's just, it's always fascinating I think to see how speaking something out loud in front of people transforms it, elevates it, you know, I mean there's also something kind of awkward and problematic, but in a way that we're really attracted to about trying to get a novel or some kind of text onto the stage that wasn't written to be on stage.

So there's tension between like in these cases literature and literary form and literary style and theater.

And so I think we've always been interested in forms colliding on stage and also just problem solving.

I think the way we came to all of this really was through Gatz, was by taking on the Great Gatsby and saying how do we do a performance from this novel where the novel itself is preserved intact on stage, where we're not replacing any of F Scott Fitzgerald's writing with our own, we're not condensing, we're not re-imagining, we're not trying to smooth the rough edges to make it fit on stage.

We wanna see it not fit, but see what kind of, see what those clashes produce.

And it sort of goes back to this thing about wanting to discover what was not planned.

And so in trying to solve that problem, you know, I think we're at our creative best when we don't know where we're going, you know, when we're trying to solve a problem.

It's interesting that you've returned often to modernist novels, which were themselves trying to find their place.

Can you talk a little about that?

What attracts you to sort of mid-century or early 20th century work?

- Well, I think it was partly that language could exist in two places at once.

The style, you know, where all those modernists sort of overlapped, one place where they overlapped was in a kind of style that felt familiar.

And I mean, I think back in the day they sometimes accused F Scott Fitzgerald of, oh, you sound like a magazine writer.

Like, he wasn't even taken seriously sometimes because of that.

But it was something familiar and immediate and real that you could begin to believe was happening right now in front of you.

And then some detail would crop up that would suddenly jerk you all the way back to the 1920s for better or worse.

But I liked the way that the early 20th century modernists can live on stage today.

- Yeah, that's like, it feels like something got started around then that still speaks to us in a more direct way than you go into the 1800s and you start to feel something musty and dark, you know, murky.

- Ornate.

- Yeah, and I think that's sort of what we discovered when we were first trying to deal with the Great Gatsby, is that we very much recognized the sense of humor in it and realize like, oh, this gets less fun when we condense it or edit it at all.

And so let's just read it, you know?

And I mean, I think the other thing that we don't pretend or we don't adjust, we don't even pretend we're not reading a book in Gatz.

You know, it's like, it's a guy walking around reading the book the whole time, and so.

- Are you really reading, because I heard a rumor in the New York theater world that you actually memorized that whole novel and that you pretend to read it on stage, is that true?

- Well, it was an accident.

(people laughing) I didn't set out to memorize the novel because the whole point is that I'm reading it right there on stage.

But you know, you read something good a few hundred times and it starts to sink in.

And it came in handy a few times when there was one night when we were performing and I had this part where I'd jump over the couch and the book had be gotten, 'cause we'd used it for so many years, it started to get sort of beat up.

And when I leapt over the couch, a piece of the book flew out and hit the back wall of the set and dropped.

And I was like, oh no.

(people laughing) We still got a lot of show to go.

We were only about, you know, we got four more hours of show.

And so I looked and I was like, oh, it was the front of the book that flew out.

So we're actually past that section, so that was fine.

And then the next morning they taped it back in.

And when opened the book at the very beginning of the show, I was like, that's not the first page of the novel.

So now my famous having memorized the book will get its tests.

- Yeah, none of us knew until you came off stage for that first intermission.

You're like, you guys put the book together the wrong way.

- But Scott, you're probably the most virtuosic actor I can think of when I think back at some of your past performances, incredible performances.

And here you are with the Worcester Group performing Rasine's neoclassical tragedy, "Phèdre" while playing badminton for a long time, sustained time.

- Yeah, we trained with the coach.

He had been the coach of the Spanish Olympic badminton team.

Woo was his name.

He was a brutal coach.

He was like, what you eat today?

You know, and he would be like, and he'd do these drills where we had to go from one corner to the other.

You know, it's like, I don't think we need to become Olympic athletes, we just have to play for five minutes in the show.

- And my job in that show was to make a sound every time Scott and the other actor would hit the birdie.

So I just had to watch them.

They did it differently every night.

And I had a few keys on a keyboard, and this was like, Scott's hit, this was Ari's hit, this was, if it hits the ground, this is if it goes off the back.

- Yeah.

The other cool thing about that show, I mean, Liz was pretty frustrated for a long time in rehearsal because she just couldn't, it was Racine's Phèdre.

And so it was this mythic story, written by Racine in that era of France and then translated by Paul Schmidt in this sort of American soap opera kind of language.

And so she was really having trouble sort of reconciling or getting the right tone.

It felt like too small or too large.

And the way she ended up solving that was to have one person, to make it almost like a puppet show.

So the people were out there doing the movements and then I had most people's lines, I had to speak all the lines from a microphone in the back.

And so something about separating the voices from the movement created that sense of scope without feeling too pompous, you know.

- So here's another crazy thing you did where you did a performance of Hamlet also with the Worcester Group in which you were synced almost exactly or very exactly.

with Richard Burton's 1960's version of the film.

- Yes, so we all had, the actors had earpieces and we were listening to the 1964 Broadway production of Hamlet with Richard Burton, and we also had video monitors facing us that the audience doesn't see that's playing the tape of that.

And so we are recreating the Richard Burton Hamlet from 1964, which would been made into a movie.

And so we were translating, the play that had been translated to a movie we were translating back into a play.

And so we had all the furniture on wheels so that every time the camera angle changed, we'd change it, we'd put all the furniture in different places.

- It's another kind of great bit of problem solving and then a kind of impossible problem.

That sort of forces you into all these sort of awkward situations that demand some kind of new creative solution.

- Right, totally unreasonable decisions that were forced on you that you then have to sort of make sense of.

- And are you attracted to that kind of situation?

I mean, that's what you want to do is get into that kind of trouble.

- Yes.

- With someone like John.

- Yes, absolutely.

I mean, what Liz, the director of the Worcester Group is always talking about is redundancy.

You know, she's like, because when you're an actor faced with a script, you sort of try and suss out what the psychology is going on with the characters, and then how can I illustrate that or how can I inhabit that?

And so there's something going on where you are as an actor, trying to send the same message that the words are already sending.

And she's looking for a way to kind of interfere with that.

So she often find some way to give the actors too much to do with the ear thing in and the things they gotta copy on the screen, or like some sort of weird costume that constrain your arms to sort of like, just so that you're so busy trying to carry out your task that you can't do that doubling down on what the script is already saying.

And there's something about that in Gatz as well, because we don't have the right set for the Great Gatsby, you know what I mean?

We don't have the right set.

It's all put into a shabby office.

And so what we have is the crummy stuff that you have in a not very luxurious office space.

And so everything that happens in the book has to be somehow illustrated with that stuff.

And so, you know, somebody, at some point, somebody's combing their hair with a stapler or something like this.

And I think it's a catalyst or an enabler of the audience's imagination.

I once read about like a theater game, like an improv warmup where you point at something and say, car, you know, and point at as you say, knee pad, you know, and you just pointed things in the room and call it something else in order to, and that gap between what it is and what you say it is, it fires the imagination.

- Yeah.

- And that sort of Gatz is constantly doing that by putting the wrong thing in front of you to match the description.

- Which leads us to "Ulysses", speaking of huge tasks, challenging tasks, which you've directed together and you're performing in one of the most celebrated novels of all time, a huge tome and a very challenging literary puzzle.

Why this novel?

Had you read it before and what do you love about it?

- Well, Scott had read it before, I had not, it was something that was proposed to us.

It's a place in New York City called Symphony Space that would host New York City's Blooms Day celebration every year on June 16th, where people would, over the course of a long day, celebrities would come and read different passages from "Ulysses".

People would sit there for hours and hours listening to different parts of the novel.

And they pitched to us or sort of commissioned, in a way, a whole theater piece based on the novel as a way to celebrate the novel's 100th birthday, this was gonna be for 2022.

This was just pre pandemic.

And of course the pandemic came and like interrupted a lot of our plans, but we did manage to throw something together for a one night only June 16th performance in it was in 22.

Yeah, and so when that was proposed to me, I thought, oh, this is perfect because I don't feel like I've satisfied, you know, my craving for literature of that time and seeing what it can do on stage.

But this book, what I did know about it was that this was gonna be impossible.

This would never work.

So that was great, let's do that.

I had been wanting something, 'cause you know, "The Great Gatsby", we did every word of it.

And it turns out that was not as hard as it sounds.

It's not the longest novel, it's a pretty short novel.

But "Ulysses" was, you know, 800 pages.

And so I just knew that was gonna demand some new and interesting solutions to an old problem that way.

So I was all in.

- Many more pages, but also a much more difficult text, much more.

- Oh my God, yeah, as I learned as I read it.

- You know, Fitzgerald is crystal clear and Joyce is up to something else, which is keeping you confused and a little bit irritated.

(people laughing) - But you had a funny story about when you first read it.

- Oh yeah, well, I first read it for college and I had signed up for a class, it wasn't a Joyce class, it was a class in literary theory, critical theory, literary theory.

And the idea was you would apply, like, you'd go through the history of different literary approaches and you'd use each one of them on "Ulysses", so you'd sort of learn about literary criticism and "Ulysses" at the same time.

And so in order to get ready for this, he gave you the summer to read "Ulysses" and then you'd come and start the class in the fall.

And so I was reading "Ulysses", like, I had a desk job and with a lot of downtime.

So I was reading and I was like constantly bewildered and perplexed and I thought, well, it's okay.

It's gonna get explained to me next semester.

And so I would just keep running my eyes, just run your eyes over every page and you'll be ready.

And then late in the summer, I got a letter in the mail from the professor who said, I've been teaching this class with "Ulysses" as the Guinea pig text for too long and I'm gonna switch to.

- Louis Carroll.

- Louis Carroll's "Through the Looking Glass".

So it never got explained to me, but it was.

- Until now.

- But I was grateful to it that it forced me through to the end.

So I got my first one under my belt, and then later when I came back to it, I had just more familiarity or I'd had that one time through.

So I knew what was coming, I knew what was gonna be punching me in the head the whole time.

So for those who don't know, "Ulysses", which I imagine is a lot of people here, we found a video clip, which is a kind of overview of the novel and why it's sort of a quick summary of just why this is such a perplexing thing to tackle.

So we thought it would be fun to maybe just play that for a few minutes and it sort of puts forward a lot of the information about this 800 page masterpiece that kind of shows you just how big a task it is to try to put this in performance.

So let's just take a look at that.

(upbeat music) - [Narrator] James Joyce's "Ulysses" is widely considered to be both a literary masterpiece and one of the hardest works of literature to read.

It inspires such devotion that once a year on a day called Blooms Day, thousands of people all over the world dress up like the characters take to the streets and read the book aloud, and some even make a pilgrimage to Dublin, just to visit the places so vividly depicted in Joyce's opus.

So what is it about this famously difficult novel that inspires so many people?

There's no one simple answer to that question, but there are a few remarkable things about the book that keep people coming back.

The plot, which transpires over the course of a single day, is a story of three characters.

Stephen Dedalus, reprised from Joyce's earlier novel, a portrait of the artist as a young man, Leopold Bloom, a half Jewish advertising canvasser for a Dublin newspaper and Bloom's wife Molly, who is about to embark on an affair.

Stephen is depressed because of his mother's recent death.

Meanwhile, Bloom wanders throughout the city.

He goes to a funeral, his work, a pub, and so on, avoiding going home because Molly is about to begin her affair.

Where it really starts to get interesting though, is how the story's told.

Each chapter is written in a different style.

15 is a play, 13 is like a cheesy romance novel.

12 is a story with bizarre, exaggerated interruptions.

11 uses techniques like onomatopoeia, repetitions and alliteration to imitate music.

And 14 reproduces the evolution of English literary prose style from its beginnings in Anglo-Saxon right up to the 20th century.

That all culminates in the final chapter, which follows Molly's stream of consciousness as it spools out in just eight long paragraphs with almost no punctuation.

The range of styles Joyce uses in "Ulysses" is one of the things that makes it so difficult, but it also helps make it enjoyable.

And it's one of the reasons the book is held up as one of the key texts of literary modernism.

A movement characterized by overturning traditional modes of writing.

Joyce fills his narrative gymnastic routines with some of the most imaginative use of language you'll find anywhere.

Take for instance the figure seated on a large boulder at the foot of a round tower was that of a broad shoulder, deep chested, strong limbed, frank eyed, redhaired, freely freckled, shaggy beared, wide mouthed, large nosed, long headed, deep foisted, bare knee, brawny handed, hair legged, ruddy faced sinew armed hero.

Here Joyce exaggerates the description of a mangy old man in a pub to make him seem like an improbably gigantic hero.

It's true that some sections are impenetrable dense at first glance, but it's up to the reader to let their eyes skim over them or break out a shovel and dig in.

And once you start excavating the text, you'll find the book to be an encyclopedic treasure trove.

It's filled with all manner of references and illusions from medieval philosophy to the symbolism of tattoos and from Dante to Dublin slang.

As suggested by the title, some of these illusions revolve around Homer's Odyssey.

Each chapter is named after a character or episode from the Odyssey.

But the literary references are often coy, debatable, sarcastic or disguised.

For example, Homer's Odysseus after an epic 20 year long journey, returns home to Ithaca and reunites with his faithful wife.

In contrast, Joyce's Bloom wanders around Dublin for a day and returns home to his unfaithful wife.

It's a very funny book.

It has highbrow intellectual humor if you have the patience to track down Joyce's references and more lowbrow dirty jokes.

Those and other sexual references were too much for some.

In the US, the book was put on trial banned and censored before it had even been completed because it was originally published as a serial novel.

Readers of "Ulysses" aren't just led through a variety of literary styles.

They're also given a rich and shockingly accurate tour of a specific place at a time, Dublin in 1904, Joyce claimed that if Dublin were to be destroyed, it could be recreated from the pages of this book.

While such a claim is not exactly true, it does show the great care that Joyce took in precisely representing details, both large and small, of his home city.

No small feat considering he wrote the entire novel while living outside of his native Ireland.

It's a testament to Joyce's genius that "Ulysses" is a difficult book.

Some people find it impenetrable without a full book of annotations to help them understand what Joyce is even talking about.

But there's a lot of joy to be found in reading it, more than just unpacking illusions and solving puzzles.

And if it's difficult or frustrating or funny, that's because life is all that and more.

Responding to some criticism of "Ulysses", and there was a lot when it was first published, Joyce said that if "Ulysses" isn't worth reading, then life isn't worth living.

- Wow, just a quick history lesson there.

It would seem to be a perfect text for ERS.

It changes form with every chapter.

It combines the profane and exquisite literary dimensions.

It's a huge challenge.

And if I may say, as a critic who's followed your work for most of that 30 years, I think it's one of the best things you've done.

- Thank you.

- Can you talk about that challenge that the text offers you?

- Yeah, I mean there were, I guess at first we were looking for a way in, and I think we both, Scott and I both had this idea, this sort of perverse idea that, well, it's impossible to do the whole book, so let's find a way to do the whole book.

Let's find a way to say we did everything.

And so we were looking for at first.

So I guess what we knew pretty early on was that we were gonna do a little bit of each chapter.

There are 18 chapters, 18 episodes, so we had to do each one of them somehow.

- Because they're all different styles.

You don't want to skip any of the flavors.

- Yeah, and there's something about, you know, that was gonna be part of our mission to be, that was how we were gonna be completist about it.

We didn't want to cut ourselves any breaks that way, but we also didn't wanna make a 28 hour long show.

So we also gave ourselves a challenge to try to do that in an hour and a half.

So what did we start with?

The idea of a single page or a contiguous section?

- Yeah, yeah, I mean, we talked about, you know, doing something small and letting that stand in for the whole book.

But this idea that we really had to go to all the different places in the book where Joyce sort of changes his approach so radically, we didn't wanna leave anything out.

- I mean, I guess what I'm describing may sound like we were making a plan and I don't wanna cop to that, but we did wanna start by figuring out which parts of the text we were gonna even try to do it all.

- Right.

- And, and how we were gonna try to make that feel complete somehow before we even started trying to figure out what actually happens on stage.

- Yeah.

- During those sections.

- Right, and so then we've tried to take one page from each chapter and we're just like, okay, let's find a one contiguous that's about a page long section that we like.

It's kind of, it's funny or.

- It's representative - Or it's representative of that chapter somehow and kind of stands alone.

And that was what we first had.

And we were pretty happy with it on the page.

And then when we tried to stage it, it was like, oh, well we need a little more than this.

When it's people on stage, you want to know who they are and what their relationships are.

And so we might have to go digging a little bit more to sort of connect those dots better.

- Yeah.

- Because that's what we ended up doing, and we had this idea based, I mean, we had this idea, this is how we can say we're doing the whole thing is, we'll fast forward between the things and we were thinking of this movie trailer, the Brian De Palma movie called Fem Fatal from the early 2000s.

- 2001, 2002, something like that.

- With Rebecca Romijn Stamos and Antonio Banderas.

And I've never seen the movie except in the trailer because the trailer is the entire movie played in fast forward, stopping every once, slowing down to regular speed every once in a while to show you the, like, you know, tantalizing things that a trailer usually shows you.

And at the end of the trailer it says, you know, as the final credits are rolling and fast forward, it says, you've just watched Brian De Palmer's new movie, do you wanna see it again?

So that's what we thought was like, oh, well, we're doing the whole thing.

We'll fast forward in the parts.

- There was also a way in doing that.

I think we were excited about having, we were always kind of looking for a way for the novel itself to have some presence, you know, either an sort of explicit presence, like in Gatz where Scott is holding the book and turning the page every time he finishes reading a page, or in this case a lot of projected text and a sort of teleprompter.

When we first did it for Symphony Space, nobody was off book yet, and nobody had memorized the line.

So we had a screen kinda like that one up there that the actors were reading things off of and.

- And it had the entire text.

So when we went to another section, it would literally fast forward through the.

- Yeah.

And eventually in what we do now, we project some of that text when it fast forwards and just give you this idea that we're living inside this universe that James Joyce completely controls that we are completely at the mercy of this novel as we try to make something happen on stage that engages with it, that delivers it in some unexpected way.

- So we have one final video clip which shows how all of that works in one scene.

Scott, can you set this clip up for us a little bit?

This is book eight, I think.

- Yeah, episode eight is called Less Dragonions.

It's named after a chapter I guess where Odysseus' men go on an island.

They eat something that's not supposed to or they eat too much and they become useless and they has to leave some of them behind on the island.

I don't really know, but in Joyce's book, it's a chapter where Bloom, the main character is sort of wandering around Dublin and it's like, there's a lot of eating in the chapter, but in this particular moment, he's looking to get some lunch and he looks into this one restaurant and he's disgusted by the way everybody's eating in there.

And the description is pretty vivid.

- And I guess it maybe it's worth mentioning that, so you're narrating in this scene, what you'll hear is the book verbatim until you hear a fast forward sound, that's when we're skipping something.

Right, but then as soon as we land back, it's exactly the words from the novel.

Nothing new from us.

- Right.

- So this is the current company of "Ulysses".

(dramatic music) - His hardest stir, he pushed in the door of the Burton restaurant.

Steak gripped his trembling breath, pungent meat juice, slush of greens, see the animals feed, man, man, man.

Perched on high stools by the bar, hat shoved back.

At the tables, calling for more bread, no charge.

Swilling, wolfing go fulls of sloppy food.

Their eyes bulging, wiping wedded mustaches.

A pallet faced young man polished his tumbler, knife, fork and spoon with his napkin.

New set of microbes, a man with an infant, sauce stained napkin chucked around him, shoveled gurgling soup down his gullet.

A man spitting back on his plate, half masticated grizzle, gums, no teeth, the chew, chew, chew it, both beef.

Smells of man spat on sawdust, sweetish warmish, cigarette smoke, wreak of plug, spilt beer, man's beery piss, the stale of ferment.

(person groaning) His gorge rose couldn't eat a morsel here.

Fellow sharpening knife and fork to all before him, old chap picking his toodles, slight spasm full chewing the cud, scuffing up stew gravy with sopping sipings of bread.

Lift it off the plate, man.

Get out of this.

He gazed round the stool and tabled eaters tightening the wings of his nose.

- Quarter pounder.

- Server gathered sticky clattering plates.

(plates clattering) Rock, the head bailiff standing at the bar blew the foamy crown from his tankard.

(person blowing) Well up it's splashed yellow near his boots, a diner knife and fork up right ready for a second helping, elbows on the table stared towards the food left across his stained square of newspaper.

Other chef telling him something with his mouth full.

Sympathetic listener, tabletop.

(person shouting) Oh, did you beef?

Mr. Bloom raised two fingers doubtfully to his lips, his eyes said, not here.

Don't see him, I hate dirty eaters.

He backed towards the door, get a light snacking, gave you burns, stop cap, keep me going happy your breakfast.

(people laughing) (audience clapping) - It looks.

- One thing you can hear going on there right at the end when we're talking at the same time, me as the narrator and Bloom himself, is how we deal with Joyce when he puts the thoughts in.

'Cause he'll just in the middle of his narration, something that's, oh, that's not narration, that's the actual mental thoughts of the character.

But he doesn't mark out, it's not an italics or in quotations, it puts it in there.

And so you kind of, that's one of the things you have to kind of decode as you're reading the book.

And so we wanted to deal with those thoughts a little differently than the actual speech.

- Yeah, I guess the other thing you can see in that is everybody's at that long table.

What we did when we started to stage it, when we had made our selections of what we were gonna, which parts we were gonna try to perform, we started out with a situation that would just look like a panel discussion, which somehow felt a little bit right for a novel that has been discussed by academics so much.

And there's just so meaty for that kind of analysis and discussion.

And so that would be our sort of premise that this is just a seven scholars coming out to do a very sober reading of the novel.

And then that we could then let become more and more chaotic and they produce more and more props from under the table.

And things just start to become more engulfed in the novel and in the novels excesses, I mean, which is, this is a great example of excess in this scene with all the eating.

And eventually they push the tables apart.

And, you know, once again, you could seen, we've thrown a lot of paper around and you know, this is a still from the episode 15, which is written like a play, but is actually one of the most difficult ones to stage because the stage directions indicate things like Bloom gives birth to eight babies.

So that was fun to stage.

- I imagine that one of the things you had to decide was when to clarify something for the audience and then when to just lean into the wildness of the novel and let people immerse themselves in that.

- Much more of the latter.

- Yeah.

(people laughing) - Although he does begin with Scott walking on stage to explain a few things and you do reappear as that guy.

- Yeah, right, well, there's a little short introduction and then intro guy comes back.

We, we added one more time for him to come back the last time we did it in Philadelphia.

So these things are changing, but also, and maybe what you mean is that in staging it sometimes, we try to put some clarity around these things that are more difficult when you read it.

And I think that's true, that does happen.

And then other times you're just like, come along for the ride.

This is the fun.

- Yeah, it's it's sort of two things.

It happens simultaneously I think, on the one hand, just speaking the words aloud, lifts them up, you know, the actors, to be able to say them, have to make a certain amount of sense out of them.

So if it's the Molly chapter at the end, which is just a stream of consciousness with no punctuation for paragraphs, just to hear the actors speak those words, they start to make sense because they have to make sense to her.

And you hear the humor and you hear the rhythm and you hear music in it.

And it makes a novel like this go from being sort of impenetrable and intimidating on the page to sort of joyful and chaotic and fun.

So that's going on.

The other thing that's going on is that we we're constraining ourselves deliberately by putting it all behind these three tables that are lined up and not really casting it with, you know, 60 people like you might if you were really gonna have an actor for each character.

So there's a tension between these kind of constraints we've imposed on ourselves and what we're trying to do.

So it's always falling apart a little bit and coming back together and being unclear and then clear.

And there's just always a kind of transformational process going on in front of you, which is a thing that I love to see on stage.

- What has surprised you the most as you delved into this text?

What did you discover that was unexpected and what would the spectators and audience who thinks they know Joyce or know nothing about Joyce, what might surprise them in coming to see this?

- I mean, I think one thing that surprised me is that one thing that, and you very much drove this, was as we were refining and refining our choices, we were starting to find those threads that weave their way through the novel, that hold it together little storylines, little images that keep returning.

And I think that was very gratifying and somewhat surprising to me that there were things that you could follow, you know?

- Yeah, right.

Because the novel's throwing so much at you, you know, like it's an exercise in a radical inclusion.

Like, it's like, oh, the book is life.

It contains everything in life that you don't normally put in a book.

But, so there is this surprise where it's like, oh, you start to see, oh, there is a bright line in there that's really quite simple and moving and about a human story and then just, what's the humor?

Do you know what I mean?

Like, oh, that's a joke.

Oh, I see what he's doing.

You know, the, when you start to do it out loud with people, that stuff just kind of bubbles up to the surface.

And it's great to discover it and because it's so dense and so cleverly encoded, do you know what I mean?

You can keep making these discoveries.

- And I think we found in doing it, and I think this is our tendency anyway, I think that's why we felt at home in this novel is that there's chaos and humor and the sort of joyfulness about it that we found that way.

And I think that, and I hope, I mean, I can't describe anyone's experience better than they can, but I hope what the experience is, a sort of something that's not pretentious or weighty or not dense in a way that excludes you, but that it feels inclusive, that it feels welcoming and exciting that way, even in its chaos.

- And is there something about the text that you think really resonates for us at this moment 2024?

I mean it's 100 plus, 110.

What year was the book finished?

1914.

- 22.

- It's in 1904, but it was written in 22.

- Yeah, and then at the very end of the book, he writes 1914 to 1921.

- Yeah, which is when he was writing it, I guess.

- Yeah, Zurich, Paris.

- Right, that's right.

- So those are the three cities.

- On the one hand it's eternal and it's as old as, Odysseus, I mean it's like, on the other hand, there's something very contemporary about it.

- Yeah, I mean it's like any of these things, I mean, we always, you know, these early 20th century novels are minefields culturally in a way.

I mean, there's no way around that.

But surprisingly resonant too.

I mean, this is one of the scenes, the big red bearded character in the cartoon, they talked about Joyce describing is a sort of horrible antisemite and a kind of Irish nationalist and has this big confrontation with Bloom.

And they're sitting around the bar debating what a nation is and you know, some of that conversation.

- What is your nation, he says to Bloom.

- Yeah, and he says, Ireland, I was born here.

And so there's, I mean, I wish it didn't sound so familiar, but it does some of that.

- And there's a sexual thing too, you know, like what Bloom, I mean, what Joyce was sort of ahead of the curve on was a kind of candor about things that weren't printed in books, but were part of life and part of the way people think, you know, and because so much of the book is a peek into inside the heads of the characters, you get a lot of thoughts that don't normally make it into literature.

And then there's something just very modern feeling about their relationship, they haven't had sex since their son died 11 years ago.

I mean, not sex, sex, you know, they've done some things and that gets described a little bit, but also that's why he's kind of making room for, to her to have this affair.

And then he meets Steven Delis, this kid who's like a poet and he's sort of drawn to him intellectual and he's like, well maybe Molly, it seems like he might be setting Molly up with him.

And so there's this sort of strange polyamory going on that you're a little surprised to discover so long ago.

- Yeah, I think people would probably be surprised by those kinds of almost contemporary attitudes, but really I think what makes a book like this still relevant is not so much, even though it does have some things to say, it turns out about, you know, our current conditions.

What it really is doing is it's this amazing exploration of just sort of raw humanity and all the sort of beauty and ugliness of being a physical human being.

And it does that sort of simultaneously with representing thought and consciousness by just telling a story of a guy just walking around Dublin, noticing things and going down little rabbit holes in his own mind.

And he does that so brilliantly and so beautifully that I think as long as there are human beings, people will relate to this novel.

- For sure, final question 'cause we have to wrap up.

You're both titans of the New York, downtown scene, you're veterans of three decades of working in a high rent city that's sometimes is full of opportunities for artists and it's sometimes hostile to artists.

And I'm just wondering what's changed for you over time and what has sustained you since this is, 30 years is a generation, really.

So I'm just wondering what you might say to someone who's thinking of going into experimental art making at this moment, which is a very somber moment for the downtown theater scene.

What has kept you going all this time and how do you think about that?

- Well, it's a two-edged sword, right?

'cause you kind of feel like, oh, that venue went away, those people aren't working anymore.

So you feel like you're seeing them drop away, but you're also, but then there's the people who are still around and it's like, they're an encouraging example, you know what I mean?

Like, oh yeah, Rich Mackerel is doing another show and it's great.

So I don't know.

That kind of works on me in both ways, you know, to see like people who are still around.

As far as the, I mean, I can't tell, do you know what I mean?

I feel like, oh yeah, nothing's happening downtown anymore, but I think like, but you're just old and you don't know what the kids are doing, you know?

So I think a lot of it has had to move out into the outer boroughs just because of the expense of real estate.

It's always, always been about real estate.

- I mean, that's the thing.

We still call it downtown because when we came to New York, there was like a cluster of little theaters on the lower East Side and they were all, you know, cheap and dirty and, you know, producing nothing but obscure, mostly bad work.

And I mean, including ours, I'm not separating us, but I mean, and that's all rearranged itself probably a few times since then.

But I think maybe all I could imagine to say now about it is that what we were doing then was kind of just leaning into working with whatever we had.

And I think that, you know, I'm sure the deficiencies and the limitations are different now than what they were then.

I don't really know.

But I mean, I think the fact that it's difficult, the fact that New York City is very forbidding and unforgiving is a reason to go there and do it.

Because you don't want this to be easy in a way.

I think you have to find, you have to find something that you've gotta claw your way out of.

That's the best way to develop these creative muscles is to have a lot to overcome.

Especially if what you're doing is, if you wanna do something new or original or experimental, if that's what we're gonna call it, you know, the difficulty is completely integral to the process of finding a voice, finding something you can do.

So don't be afraid of New York, I guess.

- That's an inspiring place to stop, I think.

I hope everyone will come and see "Ulysses" this weekend.

And John and Scott, thank you so much for talking with us.

- Thank you, Tom.

(audience clapping) - Thanks for the birthday wishes.

(people laughing) (people chattering)