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By Joseph Shaw
To most people, June 16 is just another nondescript day on the calendar. But to fans of James Joyce, it’s Bloomsday.
There’s a romantic quality to the observance: It’s the day, in 1904, when the Irish-born author went on a first date with his soon-to-be wife, Nora Barnacle. But it’s celebrated internationally for a different reason: In his masterpiece, “Ulysses,” it is the day recreated from start to finish, from sunup at the Martello Tower on the south coast of Dublin, to the nighttime musings of the drowsy Molly Bloom in bed at 7 Eccles Street.
In between, the author explored the inner thoughts of its trio of main characters, Leopold and Molly Bloom, and Stephen Dedalus, and built up, nearly brick by brick, the Dublin of June 16, 1904, and all its sights, smells, activities and characters.
To celebrate Bloomsday 2020, Guild Hall in East Hampton plans a virtual presentation of “James Joyce: A Short Night’s Odyssey From No To Yes” at 8 p.m. on Tuesday, June 16. It’s the second in a new Virtual John Drew Theater series, and it will be followed by a question-and-answer period, hosted by the theater’s artistic director, Josh Gladstone.
That creative team is small but dynamic. It features playwright Joe Beck, who wrote the one-man play; director Elizabeth Falk, whose career ranges from Shakespeare and opera to earlier virtual performances; and Austin Pendleton, actor, playwright and director, who embodies Beck’s James Joyce.
As “Ulysses” was a journey — its framework following Homer’s ultimate travelogue, “The Odyssey” — so is this work. As Joyce seemed to speak his character’s innermost thoughts in that epic work, Beck does the same for Joyce himself, echoing the language and themes of the author’s writing.
The odyssey in play for both Joyce and “Ulysses” gives the work its title. The starting point, “no,” is pulled from the semi-autobiographical episode that links “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” to “Ulysses”: Stephen Dedalus, the works’ embodiment of young Joyce, denying his mother a prayer beside her deathbed.
Early in Beck’s play, Joyce relates the scene:
I rushed back to Dublin …
and home again …
up to her room … alongside her bed …
please James, go to confession, admit your sins … do penance … and
receive holy communion …
a fiercely devout Catholic mother’s dying wish to her eldest child …
that I come to my long-lost senses in her presence …
No … I said in a firm and compassionate voice …
one syllable …
and I was free …
Joyce’s decision not to honor his mother’s last request followed him throughout his works, and life.
The endpoint, “yes,” on the other hand, is the famous “Penelope” chapter of “Ulysses,” one of the greatest in English literature, when the sleepy Molly Bloom ends a long internal monologue with a soaring expression of love and reconciliation: “yes I said yes I will Yes.”
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Austin Pendleton, the actor, playwright and director, who embodies James Joyce.[/caption]
Beck said his first taste of Joyce in college “electrified me.”
“I said, ‘This guy, I’ve never read anything that hit me like that, because it was so personal.’ That was me.”
“A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,” he said, “just intoxicated me. … For me, that takes a huge set of balls and courage to say, as a young man, he says no to his mother. That’s why I started the play there. Because he also said no to his God, country, church. He felt like his teachers and the priests were all monsters. And he found this hero in literature. And then just went to the end of the line with it. I admired that tremendously.”
Beck, 56, crafted “A Short Night’s Odyssey” as something unclassifiable. “I’m a playwright, but I’m a weird writer,” he said. “I don’t stick to one genre. I mean, I’m a high school English teacher.” A resident of Bethpage, he’s taught for 27 years at John F. Kennedy High School in Plainview.
“It’s not a traditional play by any means,” he acknowledged. “It’s a long poem. It’s a prayer. It’s a poem. It’s a prayer. It’s James Joyce. It’s that stream of consciousness.” He said it “evolved into a performance piece” that mixed his own thoughts and words with Joyce’s — as Joyce allowed bits of his own life and thoughts to animate his characters.
The unusual nature of the work was a challenge, at first, to bring to a stage setting. The task of taking the one-man work a step further — onto video, for streaming, in a time of social distancing — falls to Elizabeth Falk, the director, and Austin Pendleton, the actor.
Falk, whose long career includes being the first woman to direct at the historic Globe Theater in London, has done works of all kind, with an emphasis on Shakespeare and opera. An intimate, one-man work like Beck’s presents a unique challenge — and having to rehearse and perform on video platforms like Zoom only intensifies the challenge for a director.
“It’s a little less satisfying, if you know what I mean,” Falk said, “because there’s an energy between — I also do opera, so between singers and actors and [the] director.”
She has done similar online productions — this is her third — and she admits that it can be “unsatisfying” because of the limitations. “I’ve talked to a couple of other directors who you feel the same way, and the actors miss having any kind of audience response whatsoever,” she acknowledged.
But in comments to Guild Hall staffers, Pendleton emphasized the quality of the work itself, which allows it to transcend all of the obstacles.
“I feel that Joe has done the impossible: created a character for the theater who could actually be James Joyce,” Pendleton said of Beck. “This accomplishment in Joe’s writing astonished me. I would have thought it impossible. But here he is, Mr. Joyce, musing in free-from, struggling in free-form, about his writing, about his dreams and his successful efforts to create a literature that represented life as he knew it, in all its astounding complexity and wonder.”
Falk actually worked with Pendleton on another of Beck’s works, “Our Lady of Queens,” for a theater in Huntington. She said Beck had mentioned his Joyce work in passing during a conversation, and when Falk raised it with Pendleton, he expressed interest. “And he saw it and he just loved it,” she said.
She previously directed Pendleton in a recorded reading of the work for the Huntington theater, Cinema Arts Center. But this will be a live reading. The plan is to stream with two cameras, to allow changes of perspective more common to a theater piece.
Beck is thrilled to be working with Falk. “I love her, man,” he said. “We’re just such good pals and buddies and professionals. We have the same kind of sensibilities, and she loves my work, and I completely trust my work in her hands — and that’s a very rare relationship.”
Beck admits that handing such a personal work over to an actor to interpret is intimidating. But Pendleton, he said, “really deeply understood where I was going. And in some ways he must have connected with it, too.”
Falk, also a dramaturg, has worked beside Beck to hone the script for the stage, and on other projects. “So it’s been a labor of love. Joe and I worked together for, I think it’s seven years, on various things.”
Of Joyce, she said, “It’s like Shakespeare: No matter how many times you read it, there’s always something, like, Oh, I didn’t know that before. I didn’t see that. So that’s very rewarding.”
Pendleton, Falk said, is “a consummate actor” — and a busy one. Most recently, he was on Broadway with a play of Tracy Letts, “The Minutes” — “which I had tickets for, the week after Broadway shut down,” she lamented.
Beck said his play isn’t designed only for those already familiar with Joyce and his works. When it was performed in Huntington, he said, “we got people who said things to me for weeks afterward, like, ‘I don’t know much about this Joyce guy, but I need to find out. I want to know about him.’”
The play, he said, is “accessible to somebody that may not know much about Joyce. Anybody that’s kind of been searching deeply for your own voice, your own way, and one who is introspective and listens to your own heart, and is just curious about the world and your place in it.”
Falk, meanwhile, adds an anecdote about her first experience with the reading of the play at Guild Hall, which she calls “a magical place.” She remembers settling into the housing provided for visiting artists, near the theater, and had her pick of rooms.
“My husband and I picked out the biggest, nicest room on the corner,” she recalled. “And that night, as we were getting into bed, I looked on the side of the bed where I always sleep, the right side. There was a book of James Joyce. There it was.”
She added, “I take that as an augury.”
“James Joyce: A Short Night’s Odyssey From No To Yes” by Joe Beck will be presented online on Tuesday, June 16, at 8 p.m. as the second offering in Guild Hall’s new Virtual John Drew Theater series. The performance will be followed by a live Q&A with actor Austin Pendleton and the play’s creative team, moderated by the John Drew Theater artistic director Josh Gladstone. Tickets to access the online performance are available at guildhall.org; there is no charge, though donations are suggested. A link to the live broadcast will be emailed to ticket holders 24 hours in advance.
on Jun 9, 2020