I don’t have a ton of specific fears, but if pressed to name a few, I’d go with snakes, climate change, overdrafting, mass shootings, and the epically baffling big novels of James Joyce.

So kudos to the University Musical Society (UMS) for helping me confront that last fear this past Sunday, via the Elevator Repair Service’s stage adaptation of Ulysses, which was at the Power Center in Ann Arbor on October 19-20.

The much-studied, fever-dream doorstop of a novel—clocking in at nearly 800 pages—unfolds almost entirely within the confines of June 16th, 1904 (reportedly the date of Joyce’s first sexual encounter with future wife, Nora). Since the book debuted in 1922, Joyce’s life and work have been celebrated annually on June 16th, a day called Bloomsday, named for the character at the center of Ulysses, ad man Leopold Bloom.

Elevator Repair Service (ERS) created the show in 2022 for New York’s Symphony Space to mark the centenary of Bloomsday. It runs almost three hours and offers a theatrical Cliff’s Notes take on one of Joyce’s most confounding works. With nothing on stage but chairs and three tables (which become the seven actors’ main base of operations) and a raised, illuminated clock that approximates the time of day when each depicted scene takes place, the company offers glimpses of young Stephen Dedalus (Christopher-Rashee Stevenson), an aspiring writer who’s returned from Paris to be at his mother’s deathbed; and Bloom (Vin Knight), who’s wandering around Dublin all day to allow his wife, Molly (Maggie Hoffman), a soprano, to indulge in an affair with her concert promoter, Blazes Boylan (Scott Sheperd). 

Why does this husband enable his wife’s adultery? Because Bloom and Molly’s physical intimacy died 11 years earlier when the grieving couple lost their infant son, Rudy.

ERS’s production regularly and gleefully draws attention to the fact that it’s cherry-picking moments from Joyce’s behemoth text. Not only is the novel’s prose constantly scrolling on a screen behind the audience, but also, when the company skips through large sections to arrive at their next scene, the audience hears audio tape fast forwarding; the screen’s text blows by in a blur; and the actors all grip the table and struggle as if they’re in danger of being blown away in Joyce’s tornado of words.

Inevitably, though, the question arises: What specific moments do you highlight from a novel so dense and vast? No small task, but one for which ERS is built.

Founded in 1991 and based in New York City, ERS has become best-known for translating classic literature for the stage in unique ways—most notably via Gatz, an eight-hour take on The Great Gatsby that gave voice to the text in its entirety. But Ulysses presents a very different kind of challenge, of course—and miraculously, the company manages, through its meticulous, thoughtful sculpting of Joyce’s prose, to provide an arresting, impressionistic experience of the full range of Ulysses: its lofty moments of poetry; its corporeal longings and absurdities (boogers, men peeing next to each other, masturbation and intercourse, etc.); its dizzying mash-up of literary styles (it’s no spoiler to mention that at one point, baby dolls literally fly from Bloom’s womb); its haunting, pervasive grief; and its keen observations about joy, love, and pain.

As with much of Joyce’s prose, ERS’s Ulysses demands shell-game-like focus and engagement from its audience. You can’t be passive, for fear of losing the thread; but also, as soon as you feel you have that thread in-hand, it slips from your grasp again. This cycle of longing and frustration felt both exhausting and familiar—dare I say existential?—and made me realize how masterful ERS’s stage translation of Joyce’s iconic modernist work really is. 

Indeed, by the time we arrive at Molly’s epic, punctuation-free final soliloquy—mesmerizingly delivered by Hoffman—the stage is a visual representation of chaos (paper, discarded props, bits of costume), reminding us, as things return to stillness, of the strange journey we’d just all been on together.

And like an organic, perfect coda to ERS’s production, the young man seated behind me immediately turned to his phone to compare print editions of Ulysses to determine which one he’d order.

He suddenly seemed on fire to read this huge, almost impenetrable text, which may be among ERS’s most impressive feats.

Jenn McKee is a former staff arts reporter for The Ann Arbor News, where she primarily covered theater and film events, and also wrote general features and occasional articles on books and music.