"Gibraltar': James Joyce on stage

Patrick Fitzgerald's new drama Gibraltar is no substitute for James Joyce's Ulysses. It would take all day to play out that massive novel. Rather, Gibraltar is a two-person, moderate-length dramatization of the husband and wife who occupy the heart of Joyce's book. Because it's limited in scope, the play is pleasurably accessible.

If you want to hear Joyce's complete work read aloud, go to Philadelphia's Rosenbach Museum and Library any June 16th— known to Joyce fans as "Bloomsday"— when notable Philadelphians and literary figures do readings and re-enactments of the complete novel on the anniversary of the day that Joyce chose to set his odyssey. (Joyce's manuscript resides at the Rosenbach.)

Gibraltar received a brief engagement in New York, then was presented at Philadelphia's Plays and Players Theatre for one weekend in June. Fitzgerald portrayed Leopold Bloom, the central figure in Joyce's book. Cara Seymour played his wife Molly (born in Gibraltar, thus supplying the play's title) as well as one of his lovers and other characters.

Bloom's everyday frustrations

Missing from this stage version are Stephen Dedalus and the son-in-search-of-a-father plot that parallels Homer's Odyssey. Also gone are Buck Mulligan and other colorful Dubliners, plus the tour of pubs that is the raison d'être for many Bloomsday commemorations.

Although Dedalus is a co-protagonist in the novel, it's Bloom with whom the world identifies (even extending to Mel Brooks's use of his name for the nebbishy clerk in The Producers), presumably because of Bloom's lack of traditional heroism, his everyday frustrations, his endurance of his wife's infidelity, and his reasonableness in the face of anti-immigrant and anti-Semitic talk.

Bloom is specified as Jewish but he isn't really. His father converted to Protestantism and Leopold wasn't circumcised; then he converted to Catholicism to marry Molly, and, based on what he ate, he certainly didn't keep kosher. But when a saloon patron utters a racist slur, Bloom responds: "I belong to a race, too, that is hated and persecuted. Also now. This very moment. This very instant.... Robbed. Plundered. Insulted. Persecuted."

That passage endeared Joyce to intellectuals. And Ulysses owes its fame to their embrace of it.

Not so heavy

I've imagined Bloom with a hefty avoirdupois (a word Joyce often used) because of his relish for whiskey and food: Joyce wrote of Bloom's love for "the inner organs of beasts and fowls... thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, stuffed roast heart... mutton kidneys... pork kidneys." But Fitzgerald happens to be slender, and apparently older than Bloom's 38. Still, he embodied Bloom's universal qualities and was quite appealing.

Seymour impressively sounded and appeared different as each of her characters. As Molly she was matronly, and when she impersonated Bloom's mistress she was erotically seductive.

To read or to listen?

I agree with Rosenbach's executive director, Derek Dreher, that "reading Ulysses is like trying to read a crossword puzzle. But listening to it, the linguistic fireworks come alive." You have to read the novel to get the full flavor of "rape and red green yellow brown russet sweet big bitter ripe pomellated apples and chips of strawberries and sieves of gooseberries, pulpy and pelurious." Or Joyce's picture of a "broadshouldered deepchested stronglimbed frankeyed redhaired freely freckled shaggybearded wide-mouthed largenosed longheaded deepvoiced barekneed brawnyhanded hairylegged ruddyfaced sinewyarmed hero."

If this prose grabs you as it does me, pick up the book. Yet Gibraltar lets us savor many alliterations and flights of wordplay, and they wield extra impact when we hear them aloud.

Molly says yes

Generations of literature students have wondered what Molly Bloom's multi-page closing monologue refers to. Here it becomes clearer, and even more moving, when it's preceded by the undistracted story of Leopold and Molly's bittersweet relationship.

Molly lies in bed with her husband, wishes she had more money to buy stylish clothes and recalls her other dissatisfactions and yearnings. But then she remembers when she and Bloom fell in love in Gibraltar: "He asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes."

Gibraltar should be required for anyone exploring Joyce's world. A DVD of the play would provide an additional benefit: Viewers would be able to hear every word, which wasn't quite the case in the Plays and Players Theater. Fitzgerald and Seymour's delivery was so intimate, and their volume level so low, that some phrases were lost.