Latest news with #Ulysses'
New York Times
05-05-2025
- Entertainment
- 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.
Wall Street Journal
02-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Wall Street Journal
‘Ellmann's Joyce' Review: On the Trail of Genius
Richard Ellmann's 'James Joyce' is widely regarded as the greatest literary biography of the 20th century, much as some see Joyce's novel 'Ulysses,' published in 1922, as its supreme work of fiction. 'James Joyce' is a wonderful achievement. In some 900 pages, including ample footnotes, it confronts the strange life of a complex man, giving pleasure on every page. Ellmann circles his subject with a light tread and humorous insight, not without occasional severity, as one might treat a misbehaving family member. Forty-one when the biography was published in 1959, he was a year older than Joyce himself when copies of 'Ulysses' arrived at the Paris bookshop Shakespeare and Co., which was also its publisher. 'Ulysses' has proved indigestible to many well-intentioned readers, and not everyone was instantly won over by Ellmann's biography. From the columns of the Times Literary Supplement to the pubs of Dublin, the American academic was criticized for lack of subtlety—bluntly, knowledge—in evoking the atmosphere of early-century Dublin, for accepting Joyce's fiction generally as a record of actual events, and for treating the character Stephen Hero as a straightforward self-portrait. The compliment paid to the book by the critic Frank Kermode, that it 'proceeds without the least fuss,' could be taken as double-edged. Now we have a biography of the biographer. Zachary Leader guides us through Ellmann's life, from his birth in 1918 into a 'comfortably upper-middle-class' Jewish family in Highland Park, Mich., to his death in Oxford 69 years later. 'Ellmann's Joyce' is also an exercise in that underexposed genre, the biography of a book. Part II provides an account of the making of 'James Joyce.' Mr. Leader, an emeritus professor of English at the University of Roehampton in London, usually writes long: He is the author of a 1,000-page biography of the novelist Kingsley Amis; more recently, he produced two hefty volumes on Saul Bellow. 'Ellmann's Joyce' is more modestly proportioned. It is, the author says, 'neither a conventional biography nor a conventional analytic study.' It sits comfortably between the two. Ellmann's parents were immigrants from Russia and Romania. Their conscientious adherence to Jewish culture and opposition to 'marrying out' caused a degree of estrangement in their American-born sons, Richard and Erwin, who were drawn to non-Jewish women. There are parallels with Joyce's feelings of constraint in post-Victorian Ireland ruled by a tyrannical clergy. In 1904, when he was 22, Joyce fled to southern Europe with his girlfriend of just a few months, Nora Barnacle ('She'll stick to him,' his father quipped). They went first to the Austrian city of Pola (now Pula, in Croatia), then Trieste, and on to Paris, where they and their children settled, insofar as they settled anywhere. (Giorgio was born in 1905, Lucia in 1907; the Joyces were not formally married until 1931.) In a neat coincidence, Ellmann, feeling hemmed in by family pressure even at the age of 31, eloped with the woman he intended to marry. Ellmann's parents grew to tolerate Mary Donahue, but not her Christian name. To them, she was always 'Joan.'
Los Angeles Times
08-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
Who's afraid of James Joyce? Elevator Repair Service takes a tour of ‘Ulysses'
'Ulysses' may not be James Joyce's most difficult novel. That distinction would have to go to 'Finnegans Wake,' a book that has been described as unreadable even by its most fervent admirers. But 'Ulysses,' the modernist novel that changed the course of 20th century literature, is notoriously demanding. The book bested me when I first gave it a go in my student days. I expected to sprint through 'Ulysses' in a couple of weeks but found myself running uphill in a race I feared might never end. I finally did make it to the finish line, panting and red-faced. But I knew Joyce and I would have to have another rendezvous when I wasn't in such a rush to check a canonical box. It took more than 35 years for that reunion to happen. The book came back on my radar because Elevator Repair Service, the offbeat New York performance troupe best known for 'Gatz,' a marathon rendering of F. Scott Fitzgerald's 'The Great Gatsby,' was coming to town with its stage version of 'Ulysses.' (The production, presented by Center for the Art of Performance, had a brief run last weekend at UCLA Little Theater.) But something else was drawing me back to Joyce, a need to breathe purer air. I could spend my free time doomscrolling, or I could challenge myself to a higher pleasure. This time around I imposed no deadline. I would read 'Ulysses' for the sheer pleasure of reading. It didn't take long to be reminded that pleasure isn't necessarily pain-free. I struggled past the roadblocks, cursing at what I took to be Joyce's willful obscurity as I consulted Terence Killeen's 'Ulysses Unbound,' a user-friendly reader's guide, as well as myriad online resources, including Google Translate to contend with the polyglot author's staggering range. I extemporized a program of reading a chapter on my own and then listening to it via the excellent RTÉ recordings of 'Ulysses' (available as a podcast) that bring to life the novel's symphony of voices. The exhilaration I came to experience entailed a fair amount of exasperation. The exertion that was required seemed to belong to a pre-internet age. Joyce, allergic to exposition, plunges the reader into sink-or-swim situations. The architecture of the book follows the plan of Homer's 'Odyssey.' Leopold Bloom is the unlikely modern-day Ulysses (Odysseus' Latin name), a newspaper ad salesman with an adulterous wife who is making his circuitous way home to see what remains after his tactical daylong absence. Stephen Dedalus, Joyce's alter ego from 'A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,' is thrust into the role of Telemachus, Odysseus' son, recast as a lofty aesthete grieving the death of his mother while keeping his distance from his overbearing, dissolute father. Into this complex scheme, Joyce incorporates all sorts of radical literary experiments. The most important of these is the stream of consciousness technique that's developed in ways that had never been attempted before. Joyce tunes into the inner musings of his characters as easily as he samples the collective consciousness, past and present. The novel, Edmund Wilson writes in his super-lucid chapter on Joyce in 'Axel's Castle,' moves from the ripest naturalism, awash in bodily secretions and pungent smells, to the most feverish symbolism, where dream logic liquefies objective reality. What I derived from the novel in my late 50s is not what I took away in my 20s. I was amused at what I had underlined as an overeager student, always on the lookout for the explanatory phrase. But I'm sure in time my latest markings in the book, like photos of an old hairstyle, will also elicit an eye roll. A literary work as dense as 'Ulysses' can't help but serve as a mirror of one's mental life. My experience of this ERS production is unique to the moment of my encounter. Had I not just cohabited with 'Ulysses' for the last month, I no doubt would have spent the intermission reading chapter summaries on my phone to get a deeper understanding of the story. I was relieved that this version of 'Ulysses' wasn't an eight-hour affair like 'Gatz,' which offered the complete text of 'The Great Gatsby.' (Joyce's novel would take at least 24 hours to read aloud, or all of Bloomsday, the annual celebration of the author.) The novel's 18 chapters are served cafeteria-style, a little from this section, a little from that, to provide an overview of the main action. The focus is on Bloom's wanderings through Dublin on June 16, 1904, the day his wife, Molly, a noted singer, begins an affair with a professional colleague named Blazes Boylan. Subsidiary but no less integral is Stephen's crisscrossing path through the city. When these displaced, grief-laden men lingeringly intersect late in the novel, nothing really changes in terms of the plot but everything changes in terms of the book's spiritual design. In the intimate confines of Macgowan Hall's Little Theater, seven actors took their seats at conference tables lined up for what looked like a panel discussion. An institutional clock kept track of the fictional time of day. Scott Shepherd, an ERS mainstay who was not only part of the ensemble but also co-directed with John Collins and served as dramaturg, introduced the proceedings in an impishly folksy manner reminiscent of the Stage Manager in Thornton Wilder's 'Our Town.' He explained that the text would be fast-forwarded regularly. When this happened, the sound of a screeching tape catapulted the company to another passage in the book. Joyce's words rang out mellifluously at the start of the production, but as the main characters emerged from the reading, some of the musicality of the writing was lost. ERS doesn't traffic in emotional realism or literal re-creation. The company's aesthetic mode is wayward, oblique, loose and jocular. In 'Gatz,' the novel's narrative texture was conveyed through zany approximation — the troupe finding Fitzgerald not by effacing itself but by embracing its eccentric difference. The same eventually happened here, but I had to resign myself to what was missing. What I find irresistible about 'Ulysses' is the clarity with which the interior lives of Stephen and Bloom come into view. Amid all the rhetorical puzzles and literary pyrotechnics, these characters reveal to us their longings and insecurities, their preoccupations and rationalizations, their alienation and sociability — in short, their souls or, as Bloom more scientifically defines this mystical human substance, 'gray matter.' Hamlet-figures dressed in inky black, they are both processing loss. Bloom, whose day's journey takes him to the funeral of a friend, is still mourning his son, Rudy, who died shortly after birth. Stephen, called back from Paris as his mother was dying, is tormented a year later by his refusal to pray over her as she entreated him to do. Estranged in different ways — Bloom as a Jew (with a wife with a loose reputation) and Stephen as a freethinking young artist in Catholic Ireland — they have complementary needs. Bloom to love and to pass on some of what he has learned, Stephen to become secure and stable enough to realize his enormous potential. On stage, Stephen (Christopher-Rashee Stevenson), wearing the suit jacket and short trousers of a schoolboy prince of Denmark, was a strangely recessive presence. Stevenson seemed to deliberately deflect attention from Stephen's words, mumbling lines as though they were the character's private property and not meant to be spoken aloud. (A defensible literary interpretation but a theatrically deadening one.) Stevenson actually created a more vivid impression in his brief appearance as Bloom's cat. Vin Knight was more dynamic as Bloom, the adaptation's clear protagonist. Costume designer Enver Chakartash dressed the character, described at one point in the book as a 'new womanly man,' in a mourning jacket and complicated skirt, with green socks adding a fey accent to the gender-fluid ensemble. Knight found the gravity of the pragmatic, rational Bloom while preserving his essential nimbleness. The surrogate father-son flirtation between Stephen and Bloom accumulated power more through the staging than through acting. Scenically, the narrative built as it proceeded. The conference tables were imaginatively reconfigured by the design collective dots for the surreal brothel scene, and the lighting of Marika Kent made wild magic without disrupting the minimalist scheme. The production was somewhat more adept in telling than showing. (Stephanie Weeks, Dee Beasnael and Kate Benson, in addition to playing numerous supporting characters, helped keep the narration smoothly on track.) I wish everyone had Shepherd's command of the company's house style. His cameos as Blazes Boylan, jitterbugging across the stage with the self-satisfied air of a country rake, were not just enlivening but renewing, capturing the character in a new idiom. Maggie Hoffman delivered Molly's stream of erotic consciousness that ends the novel with just the right touch of unabashed earthiness. If I hadn't recently listened to the brilliant rendition of Pegg Monahan in the RTÉ Broadcast, I might not have missed the ferocious Irish lilt that animates the animal lusts and petty grievances of Joyce's character. I should confess that I turned to the novel as an escape from my disgust with our political situation. But politics runs through the book. Ireland is under brutal colonial rule, and partisan conflict is as inescapable as religious strife. But Stephen and Bloom don't want to be dominated by ideology. Stephen resists having his intellectual freedom ensnared by patriotic sanctimony: 'Let my country die for me,' he drunkenly tells a British soldier. Bloom contends that 'Force, hatred, history, all that' are 'not life for men and women, insult and hatred.' It's the opposite of these things 'that is really life,' by which he means 'love.' Joyce gives us this insight in a book that understands that it's no more possible to dismiss politics than it is to do away with the demands of the body. We exist in concentric realms, and our multifarious lives can only be lived. The same is true for art. There are things I wanted from this stage production that I didn't get. But there were unexpected rewards, and my view of 'Ulysses' expanded. We must make room on the bed of life and say, as Molly does in the book's last word: 'Yes.'
Yahoo
16-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Now streaming, Irish Rep's 'Beckett Briefs,' headlined by F. Murray Abraham, asks the essential questions
In the program for 'Beckett Briefs,' a bill of three short plays by Samuel Beckett at the Irish Repertory Theatre in New York City, three questions are posed: 'Why these plays?' 'Why now?' And 'Why Beckett?' The concise answers put forth by the production's director, Ciarán O'Reilly, and Irish Rep Artistic Director Charlotte Moore are not my own, but I agree with them when they write that 'there has never been a more consequential time to delve deeper and ask the fundamental questions: The Whys.' On a recent short trip, while deciding what to see, I felt compelled to make room for Beckett in what was an impossible schedule. Yes, I was curious to see Oscar winner F. Murray Abraham in the play I consider Beckett's masterpiece, 'Krapp's Last Tape.' And yes, I find I'm unable to pass up an opportunity of seeing 'Play,' in which three characters — a man, his wife and his mistress — are potted in funeral urns in the hereafter, each retelling their side of a romantic triangle that hardly seems worth the everlasting discord. As for 'Not I,' the briefest of the three pieces, I have been waiting for another chance to experience the spotlighted mouth of a woman talking a mile a minute in fragments that I have yet to be able to piece together. Sarah Street, who heroically performed the work at a hurtling pace, confirmed for me that coherent narrative sense wasn't what Beckett was aiming for. After I arranged tickets, it was announced that the League of Live Stream Theater will be streaming 'Beckett Briefs' from March 16 through March 30. I had thought this bill would be an ideal streaming offering and wished I had known in advance, but I'm glad I got to experience the production in person for reasons that have to do with the 'Why Beckett?' question. Beckett is perennially timely because his works concern themselves with those eternal questions that the political emergencies of the day cannot override. Even as we confront impossible times, we remain planted in that greater impossibility — human existence. But I was craving 'Beckett Briefs' for other reasons. I want to be more mindful of where I place my attention. Our minds are being hijacked by Big Tech, and one of the ironies of our age is that, even as our access to information, entertainment and consumer goods has grown exponentially, our capacity to focus and extend ourselves cognitively has become severely impaired. As an act of personal resistance, I'm tackling James Joyce's 'Ulysses' again. I'll admit it's a struggle. I read a chapter, browse through supporting materials online, and then listen to the chapter in an audio recording on YouTube. Tech isn't all bad. The resources on the internet were not available to me when I read 'Ulysses' for the first time as a student. But back then, I didn't feel the need to read Joyce as a sociological corrective. And I was somewhat more comfortable with the idea of difficulty in art. I wasn't conditioned to expect everything worthwhile to be predigested and readily exploitable. Joyce was, of course, Beckett's mentor, and though he went in the opposite direction of Joyce's maximalism, he shares the same determination to start from scratch with artistic form. In whatever discipline Beckett happened to be working in, he reinvestigated not just the vocabulary but the grammar of that medium. His plays demonstrate a fierce effort to get down to brass tacks. What is the least that is required to reveal the most? Audiences have no choice but to exist in the theatrical moment, without recourse to linear logic, sententious language or psychological epiphanies. 'Krapp's Last Tape' creates a dialogue between an old man and his younger self, through audio diary tapes that reveal what the character was like 30 years earlier — to his everlasting disgust. Krapp eavesdrops, in effect, on his younger literary aspirations and his decision to end the relationship that turned out to be his last chance of love. The play may be Beckett's most personal, the one that brings you closest to the man. In less than an hour, it achieves what took Marcel Proust, another key literary influence, thousands of pages in 'In Search of Lost Time' to convey — that we die not once but myriad times, being a succession of selves, recognizable yet discrete. Abraham, adopting a dignified clown demeanor, has an embodied theatricality that is well suited to Beckett's style. His exuberant acting benefits from the severity of Beckett's concision. I recently showed my students the film of John Hurt's performance in 'Krapp's Last Tape,' which I was lucky enough to see in person at the Kirk Douglas Theatre. It remains for me the high-water mark of Beckett acting. But I was grateful to experience the text through a different voice and countenance. It tells you something about Beckett that an actor of Abraham's stature wants to do this play off-Broadway at this time of his career. The cast of 'Play' — Kate Forbes, Street (doing double duty after 'Not I') and Roger Dominic Casey — lends the astringent playfulness a fresh tone in a lucid, deliberate, perhaps a tad overcareful production. The audience at Irish Rep on the Sunday matinee I attended may have been Beckett veterans, but it's vital that a new generation of artists stays in contact with the vision of this pathbreaking playwright. Which brings me to the other reason I had for seeing 'Beckett Briefs' — my complete fatigue with realism. Or should I say my exhaustion with a kind of TV realism that seems to believe the purpose of art is to offer a slice not so much of life but of idiosyncratic behavior. It's not simply that the canvas has shrunk. Beckett worked on a rigorously compact scale. It's that realism has been confused with reality, and I worry that actors and writers are losing sight of the experience of living by zooming in on psychological minutiae. Beckett reminds us of the metaphysical vastness that the stage can contain. Luckily, his style, always so ahead of us, is amenable to the close scrutiny of streaming. Were he alive he would have designed a digital performance that would have made us rethink the possibilities of the form. But it's heartening that more people will be able to experience through "Beckett Briefs" the aesthetic renewal of his example. For streaming tickets to "Beckett Briefs," click here. Get notified when the biggest stories in Hollywood, culture and entertainment go live. Sign up for L.A. Times entertainment alerts. This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
Los Angeles Times
16-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
Now streaming, Irish Rep's ‘Beckett Briefs,' headlined by F. Murray Abraham, asks the essential questions
In the program for 'Beckett Briefs,' a bill of three short plays by Samuel Beckett at the Irish Repertory Theatre in New York City, three questions are posed: 'Why these plays?' 'Why now?' And 'Why Beckett?' The concise answers put forth by the production's director, Ciarán O'Reilly, and Irish Rep Artistic Director Charlotte Moore are not my own, but I agree with them when they write that 'there has never been a more consequential time to delve deeper and ask the fundamental questions: The Whys.' On a recent short trip, while deciding what to see, I felt compelled to make room for Beckett in what was an impossible schedule. Yes, I was curious to see Oscar winner F. Murray Abraham in the play I consider Beckett's masterpiece, 'Krapp's Last Tape.' And yes, I find I'm unable to pass up an opportunity of seeing 'Play,' in which three characters — a man, his wife and his mistress — are potted in funeral urns in the hereafter, each retelling their side of a romantic triangle that hardly seems worth the everlasting discord. As for 'Not I,' the briefest of the three pieces, I have been waiting for another chance to experience the spotlighted mouth of a woman talking a mile a minute in fragments that I have yet to be able to piece together. Sarah Street, who heroically performed the work at a hurtling pace, confirmed for me that coherent narrative sense wasn't what Beckett was aiming for. After I arranged tickets, it was announced that the League of Live Stream Theater will be streaming 'Beckett Briefs' from March 16 through March 30. I had thought this bill would be an ideal streaming offering and wished I had known in advance, but I'm glad I got to experience the production in person for reasons that have to do with the 'Why Beckett?' question. Beckett is perennially timely because his works concern themselves with those eternal questions that the political emergencies of the day cannot override. Even as we confront impossible times, we remain planted in that greater impossibility — human existence. But I was craving 'Beckett Briefs' for other reasons. I want to be more mindful of where I place my attention. Our minds are being hijacked by Big Tech, and one of the ironies of our age is that, even as our access to information, entertainment and consumer goods has grown exponentially, our capacity to focus and extend ourselves cognitively has become severely impaired. As an act of personal resistance, I'm tackling James Joyce's 'Ulysses' again. I'll admit it's a struggle. I read a chapter, browse through supporting materials online, and then listen to the chapter in an audio recording on YouTube. Tech isn't all bad. The resources on the internet were not available to me when I read 'Ulysses' for the first time as a student. But back then, I didn't feel the need to read Joyce as a sociological corrective. And I was somewhat more comfortable with the idea of difficulty in art. I wasn't conditioned to expect everything worthwhile to be predigested and readily exploitable. Joyce was, of course, Beckett's mentor, and though he went in the opposite direction of Joyce's maximalism, he shares the same determination to start from scratch with artistic form. In whatever discipline Beckett happened to be working in, he reinvestigated not just the vocabulary but the grammar of that medium. His plays demonstrate a fierce effort to get down to brass tacks. What is the least that is required to reveal the most? Audiences have no choice but to exist in the theatrical moment, without recourse to linear logic, sententious language or psychological epiphanies. 'Krapp's Last Tape' creates a dialogue between an old man and his younger self, through audio diary tapes that reveal what the character was like 30 years earlier — to his everlasting disgust. Krapp eavesdrops, in effect, on his younger literary aspirations and his decision to end the relationship that turned out to be his last chance of love. The play may be Beckett's most personal, the one that brings you closest to the man. In less than an hour, it achieves what took Marcel Proust, another key literary influence, thousands of pages in 'In Search of Lost Time' to convey — that we die not once but myriad times, being a succession of selves, recognizable yet discrete. Abraham, adopting a dignified clown demeanor, has an embodied theatricality that is well suited to Beckett's style. His exuberant acting benefits from the severity of Beckett's concision. I recently showed my students the film of John Hurt's performance in 'Krapp's Last Tape,' which I was lucky enough to see in person at the Kirk Douglas Theatre. It remains for me the high-water mark of Beckett acting. But I was grateful to experience the text through a different voice and countenance. It tells you something about Beckett that an actor of Abraham's stature wants to do this play off-Broadway at this time of his career. The cast of 'Play' — Kate Forbes, Street (doing double duty after 'Not I') and Roger Dominic Casey — lends the astringent playfulness a fresh tone in a lucid, deliberate, perhaps a tad overcareful production. The audience at Irish Rep on the Sunday matinee I attended may have been Beckett veterans, but it's vital that a new generation of artists stays in contact with the vision of this pathbreaking playwright. Which brings me to the other reason I had for seeing 'Beckett Briefs' — my complete fatigue with realism. Or should I say my exhaustion with a kind of TV realism that seems to believe the purpose of art is to offer a slice not so much of life but of idiosyncratic behavior. It's not simply that the canvas has shrunk. Beckett worked on a rigorously compact scale. It's that realism has been confused with reality, and I worry that actors and writers are losing sight of the experience of living by zooming in on psychological minutiae. Beckett reminds us of the metaphysical vastness that the stage can contain. Luckily, his style, always so ahead of us, is amenable to the close scrutiny of streaming. Were he alive he would have designed a digital performance that would have made us rethink the possibilities of the form. But it's heartening that more people will be able to experience through 'Beckett Briefs' the aesthetic renewal of his example. For streaming tickets to 'Beckett Briefs,' click here.
