The 1933 trial that ended the US ban against James Joyce’s “Ulysses” for obscenity is viewed as a significant victory for free expression, almost as much of a landmark in legal circles as the novel itself is a landmark for lovers of literature. “The United States vs. Ulysses,” which has opened tonight at the Irish Arts Center, takes on both landmarks. It stages the court case while intertwining dramatized excerpts from Joyce’s novel. Irish playwright Colin Murphy elucidates the legal arguments, doing justice to both sides, and even illuminates some aspects of the famously complex novel. All this is presented in a production that is often playful and entertaining, but also works too hard at being inventive.
The story is framed as an episode of The March of Time, a radio program from the 1930’s that re-enacted news events. Liam Doona’s set is a radio studio, and we meet the versatile six-member cast as the director and actors of the broadcast, who are each portraying multiple characters. In a note in the program, the playwright explains that the court case was actually an episode of The March of Time, and adds parenthetically “helpfully, it appears to be lost.” So, the play is an imaginative re-creation of an imaginative re-creation of a 92-year-old court case.
This may not be inherently problematic, but for about half of the 85-minute running time, the director Conall Morrison has clearly instructed the cast to perform with loud and exaggerated diction, as if to overcome the static of a 1930s radio broadcast.
They eventually settle more credibly into their principal characters. Ross Gaynor portrays Random House publisher Bennett Cerf, who has decided to test the ban in court, by importing a single copy of the book published abroad. He hires famed defense attorney Morris Ernst (Mark Lambert), who goes up against prosecutor Sam Coleman (Gaynor again) in front of Judge John Munro Woolsey (Morgan C Jones.)
Ernst is depicted as a wily lawyer whose strategy initially is to use technical arguments, and actively avoid discussing the profane words themselves. Soon, though, we get some substantive exchanges:
Coleman: An author’s right to freedom of expression is not unfettered.
Ernst: Freedom of expression is not merely about the author – it is about the reader – about our freedom to choose what we read – our freedom to encounter thoughts and forms of expression that are new to us. The marketplace of ideas.
Coleman: This is not about ideas, Your Honor. The obscenity in this chapter…is real. It does real harm – and it is our duty to protect the people from harm.
Ernst: From physical harm. It is not our duty to protect people from the so-called harm of being ‘offended’.
It is a credit to the playwright that Coleman is not depicted as a philistine, nor resoundingly bested by Ernst The prosecutor continues to argue reasonably how pornography leads to “the coarsening of the public sphere” and that “obscenity should be judged by its effect on the most vulnerable.” He also counters the praise for Ulysses from various intellectuals with condemnation of the novel by other intellectuals, most bracingly Virginia Woolf: “An illiterate, underbred book, the work of a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples. The pages reel with indecency.”
Here, as elsewhere, Judge Woolsey shows his impatience (and his wit): “Gentlemen, we have established that intellectuals disagree on Ulysses – indeed, disagreeing on such as Ulysses would sometimes appear to me to be the sole function of intellectuals .”
Through much of the proceedings, Molly Bloom (Clare Barrett), a central character in “Ulysses,” continually interjects the word “yes,” which is a not-at-all obscure allusion to those with even the most passing acquaintance with the novel. She says yes many times in the final episode of “Ulysses,” which is Molly’s long (punctuation-less) monologue – and the prosecutor’s exhibit A for his claims of the book’s obscenity.
Much of the dramatized excerpts from the novel seem intended to illustrate what the prosecutor is talking about. They are woven into the play, usually alternating single lines with the court proceedings rather than being given their own scene. But one exception is an extended scene presenting a hallucinatory trial of Leopold Bloom, the protagonist of “Ulysses,” for his serial attempted philandering. (Jonathan White as Leopold and especially Barrett as Molly are so persuasive in their roles that I hope at the very least that they’ll do one of the many readings on Bloomsday, June 16, which is the day in 1904 when the events in the novel take place.) That scene is taken from chapter 15 of the novel, officially the “Circe” episode, but also referred to as the Nighttown episode. (I point this out because it’s inherently dramatic, and was indeed adapted into the 1974 Broadway musical “Ulysses in Nighttown” starring Zero Mostel as Leopold Bloom.)
“The United States vs. Ulysses” is at its most intellectually stimulating when it digs deeper into Joyce’s writing. Ernst defends, and vividly (poetically) explains, the author’s then-novel use of stream-of-consciousness. More importantly, it gets at what is arguably the heart of Joyce’s story: Leopold and Molly Bloom are still mourning the death of their child a decade earlier, something we see in one of the dramatized excerpts, and hear from the lawyer’s testimony. “Perhaps you could say Ulysses is obscene…because life and death are obscene.”
The United States vs. Ulysses
Irish Arts Center through June 1
Running time: 85 minutes, no intermission
Tickets $25–$76
Written by Colin Murphy
Directed by Conall Morrison
Set design by Liam Doona, costume design by Catherine Fay, lighting design by John Comiskey, composition and sound design by Simon Kenny
Cast: Clare Barrett as Molly Bloom and others; Ross Gaynor as publisher Bennett Cerf, prosecutor Sam Coleman and others; Morgan C Jones as Judge John Munro Woolsey, Ezra Pound and others; Mark Lambert as defense attorney Morris Ernst and others; Ali White as the Voice of Ulysses and others; Jonathan White as the Director and Leopold Bloom and others.
Photos by Nir Arieli
