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ERS’s Ulysses Is a Little Stately, a Little Plump
Think you’re escaping and run into yourself.
Though here he plays sidekicks and comical rakes like Buck Mulligan and Blazes Boylan, he still exerts a gravitational pull inside the production, and his software—given visual life by Matthew Deinhart’s projections, which turn the intentionally drab, conferencelike scenic design by the ubiquitous dots collective into a blank page awaiting verbiage—is the engine of the machine. Joyce’s novel, in all its unashamedly cocksure modernist maximalism, is a million and one things — an eighteen-episode riff on The Odyssey; a roiling spring for various streams of consciousness; a dance with Shakespeare and Dante and Milton and countless other footnoteables; a walking tour of Dublin; an experiment in diction from the slangy to the archaic, the high-poetic to the devilishly prurient. The rapturous crescendo of Molly’s “yes I said yes I will Yes” feels more akin to an earlier moment in which her husband masturbated to the sight of a young woman on the beach, rather than an expansive confluence of physical pleasure, memory, presence, and deep, existential embrace of life.
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