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New York Times

‘The United States vs Ulysses' Review: The Case That Won't Go Away

Though it was a civil case, the defendant faced capital punishment. Or so the defendant's attorney, Morris Ernst, argued, because his client was a book. And not just any book, but a particular copy of James Joyce's 'Ulysses' that had been impounded at U.S. Customs and charged with obscenity. 'If the book loses,' Ernst proclaimed, 'it will be destroyed — burned — hanged by the neck until it is dead.' Ernst's florid oratory in United States v. One Book Called Ulysses was successful. On Dec. 6, 1933, as soon as the judge, John Munro Woolsey, delivered his decision finding 'Ulysses' not obscene — thus permitting a hardback of the French edition to pass through customs — Random House began typesetting an American version, the first to be published in an English-speaking country. Woolsey's landmark order, along with a foreword by Ernst calling it a 'body-blow for the censors,' is included in most copies of 'Ulysses' to this day. Lawyers and judges are not typically heroes in literature, and of late almost never in plays. They are mostly depicted as preening and eely. Yet in 'The United States vs Ulysses,' a play by Colin Murphy now at the Irish Arts Center in Manhattan, Ernst and Woolsey (if not Samuel Coleman, who represented the government) are offered as paragons of progressivism in action. Indeed, the playwright has elevated them almost to the level of Joyce himself. And yet for all its worthiness, liberal uplift and pressing topicality, the play, directed by Conall Morrison, proves just how unmatchable Joyce remains. Murphy's complicated schema, though less complicated than that of 'Ulysses,' is ultimately less expressive, as nearly anything would be. Its account of the trial, drawn from transcripts and other historical sources, is but the middle of three shells. The innermost shell is 'Ulysses' itself, represented by passages either specifically mentioned in court (like the scandalous 'Nausicaa' episode) or thematically relevant to the proceedings (like the fantastical trial of Leopold Bloom, the novel's main character, in 'Circe.') The outermost shell introduces another unlikely hero these days: the media. The play is set two days after Woolsey's verdict, as the five-person cast of the CBS radio program 'The March of Time' awaits the scripts for that evening's live episode. With the help of sound effects from the foley table — gavel bangs, telegraph taps — the voice actors will play all the roles, both in the courtroom and in the dramatized 'Ulysses' segments. Even their director will chip in, playing Bloom. That outer shell is true enough: 'The March of Time' was a real program, an odd blend of documentary and dramatization. On Dec. 8, 1933, it did broadcast a segment about the 'Ulysses' trial, even if the archival recording, as Murphy writes in a note to the script, has 'helpfully' been lost. The loss allowed him to fictionalize the studio scenes and imagine how the show might have presented the material. Despite the trial's oratorical high points, the scope of Murphy's imagination is hampered by the realities of jurisprudence. As you would expect from a case featuring an inanimate defendant, the dramatization is pocked with longueurs, as Ernst (Mark Lambert) and Coleman (Ross Gaynor) recirculate the same arguments while Woolsey (Morgan C. Jones) tries to keep them on track. When it's not thrilling, it's wearisome. Still, the trial scenes are more compelling than the broadcast ones, which include generic theatrical chatter and forced actorly silliness. The cast fights over the microphone and makes jokes about subtext. As independent characters, they barely exist; despite their being devices, our grasp of them is weak. But the inner shell, the material from 'Ulysses' — following Bloom and a host of other Dubliners over the course of one day in 1904 — is wonderful, and radiates that wonderfulness out to the others. Jonathan White makes the lovelorn cuckold Bloom a delicately tragic figure. Clare Barrett, who has nothing to do during the trial but occasionally shout 'Yes!' from the sidelines, imbues the appetitive Molly, Bloom's wife, with a sense of exaltation and sadness that makes what some have found obscene in the book feel utterly natural onstage. Ali White, similarly sidelined in the trial scenes, now gets to shine as the voice of the novel itself, narrating its most erotic passages with mounting excitement. And it is perhaps a wicked comment on the government's case that Gaynor, the government's attorney in the courtroom, plays Blazes Boylan, Molly's preening, eely lover. Morrison's staging is also at its most inventive in those moments, as the Dublin debauchees of 1904 invade the Manhattan trial of 1933 like ghosts far livelier than the haunted. The actors — four of whom performed in the play's 2023 Irish premiere — are excellent transformers, if clearly most at home in the 'Ulysses' episodes. (Their American accents are intermittently accurate.) One could wish that the studio set (by Liam Doona) would transform as completely, but the lighting (by John Comiskey), sound (by Simon Kenny) and costumes (by Catherine Fay) all compensate. Still, for all its Joycean ribaldry and procedural interest, much of it played for laughs, 'The United States vs Ulysses' leaves a distinctly (and properly) troubling aftertaste. When asked by Bennett Cerf, the Random House publisher, whether he has read 'Ulysses,' Ernst, a board member of the American Civil Liberties Union, responds that he doesn't have time. 'The country's on fire — and I'm on the front line!' he thunders, using language the playwright has adapted from a contemporary A.C.L.U. report. 'The Klan on the march again … Fascists organizing — in America!' To which Cerf adds, 'And books are being banned.' Your ears may lift off your head at that moment. Not just because of the persistence of white supremacist incidents and the resurgence of fascism in the United States. And not even, despite his status as a secular saint, because Ernst later snitched on his A.C.L.U. colleagues to Herbert Hoover. No, it's those books. More than 10,000 were banned from schools during the 2023-2024 school year. Even more recently, in March, a judge temporarily blocked, for the second time, attempts by Iowa lawmakers to remove from libraries any works that depict sex acts, no matter their 'political, artistic, literary, and/or scientific value.' Among those books, 92 years after the landmark case this play celebrates, was 'Ulysses.' Just because things can get better does not mean they won't get worse.