Bloomsday on Broadway

Even though New York’s Symphony Space has been hosting Bloomsday celebrations for decades, this year’s event was a first: The reading of a complete episode of Ulysses from start to finish.

The chapter of choice was ‘Ithaca’, Ulysses’s penultimate episode, said to be Joyce’s favourite, in which Leopold Bloom returns home with Stephen Dedalus. This is also the book’s scientific section: a veritable celebration (if not outright parody) of empiricism, where the action is related through a series of questions and answers, and the answers favour the complex over the simplistic, the objective over the subjective, the detailed over the broad. For instance:

How did the Bloomsday readings proceed?

With a simple stage setup — five stand-up microphones at the front of the stage and one to the side. At the side, in a white tuxedo, was the event’s host, Isaiah Sheffer, whose duties included: greeting the audience, introducing passages to be read, acknowledging the readers, summarizing passages and, on several occasions, reading from the text himself.

Standing at the five microphones at the front of the stage: a varied and rotating cast of readers, some young, some old, some men, some women, several Irish, many Americans, a few famous (Frank and Alphie McCourt), most not. Total reading time for the Ithaca episode: four hours, forty-five minutes, followed by seven minutes of poems from Joyce’s Chamber Music, arranged for piano and soprano voice by Ross Lee Finney, performed by Judith Kellock and Janice Weber; concluded by Fionnula Flanagan’s reading of ‘Penelope’, the final chapter in Ulysses, which clocked in at two hours and fifteen minutes.

Did the audience respond well?

With a nearly full house at the beginning of the night and a good many staying until the two a.m. conclusion; with attentive listening, with ready laughter, gasps and sighs at appropriate moments (and not at inappropriate ones); with heartfelt applause; with worn copies of Ulysses to be found in the hands of many audience members, following faithfully along with the readings — yes, yes they did.

The readers themselves were inspired, dramatic, impressive — not least because, as the ‘Ithaca’ chapter is so very empirical, they were obliged to make expense lists and bookshelf inventories sound compelling. That they succeeded — and that the audience would have forgiven them even if they had not — is testament not only to the success of this particular reading but, of course, to the great, odd book that continues to find new life each year, and never more so than on June 16.