How I Spent My Memorial Day Weekend: Well, I did a couple of
normal things for a few hours of the three-day holiday weekend, like visiting
friends in the country, picking up my car from its winter storage for
summertime use, and attending the festivities at the newly-refurbished Soldiers
and Sailors Monument near my home on Riverside Drive. And I did do a bit of
resting up after a week that included a 12-hour Bach marathon, a Selected
Shorts booking up in Westport,
the celebratory closing night of our 24th season of Shorts here at
home, the final lengthy session of our All Write! adult literacy program, and a
little bit of fund-raising, new Board Member-recruiting, and copy editing for
next season’s brochure.
But MOST of my time on the opening weekend of summer was
spent at the computer switching back and forth between two huge Excel
Spreadsheets, one listing the 138 reading slots contained in the final script I
have devised, with the help of my collaborators Allegra
Vecchio and Mac Barrett,
for this year’s June 16th Bloomsday on Broadway XXVII, our 27th
annual celebration of language, lust, love, and literature in James Joyce’s Ulysses, which takes place on June 16,
1904. The other spreadsheet contains the names, addresses, and hours of
availability on June 16th of the 98 Broadway stars, working actors,
Irish diplomats, scholars, and avid Joyceans who have said they are up for
reading this year.
Each year, Bloomsday on Broadway takes a somewhat different
focus in its selections from the multifaceted novel, Ulysses. Our ambitious plan this year is to spend (roughly) the
first four hours reading—for the first time ever, anywhere—the complete, uncut,
uncensored text of the book’s next-to-the-last episode, the “Ithaca” chapter,
in which Mr. Leopold Bloom returns home after his day’s wanderings, bringing
with him the book’s other hero, young Stephen Dedalus. For this chapter—his
favorite, he said—Joyce chose a mock serious form of pseudo-scientific question
and answer catechism in which every little thing is described fully, often in
hilarious minute detail. For example, when Mr. Bloom, starting to make some hot
cocoa which will help young Stephen sober up after his Nighttown brothel
roisterings, turns on the kitchen water tap, the question reads “Did it flow?” And
the answer is a two page description of the Dublin water-supply system from the mountain
reservoirs through the pipes and right up to the kitchen, followed by a
rhapsodical disquisition on the wondrous properties in history, geography, and
physics of good old H2O!
Which brings me back to my computer and the two
spreadsheets. The artistry is in trying to match each reading selection to the
right reader, keeping in mind such considerations as acting experience (the top
actors get the toughest assignments—Marian Seldes will read the water section, Frank McCourt will catalogue Bloom’s bookshelves,
brother Malachy will enact the violent patriotic Irish Citizen), vocal
suitability, the flow of voices, male and female, old and young, fairness
(giving everyone who reads a decent, enjoyable part to play), hours of
availability (Stephen Colbert can’t
get there till late, so he’s reading about Mr. Bloom finally getting into bed),
and history (now let’s see, what did she
read last year and the year before that?).
Piecing all this together is slow, painstaking work, with
considerable anxiety that it can all work out just fine, but with every cell in
the spreadsheets now filled in, I feel great, and excited that this is going to
be a wonderful 27th Bloomsday. Let me conclude this blog posting with the final
three paragraphs, which may interest you, from the letter of transmittal which
is going out today to each reader along with his or her script:
Feel
free to call to discuss your text and ask any questions about its meaning,
pronunciation of words, or the quasi-comical tongue-in-cheek catechism style
which Joyce used for the Ithaca
episode. PLEASE NOTE our long held
artistic policy that prohibits artificial accents, even if you do them well.
This is Bloomsday on BROADWAY. You must sound like yourself, whether you were born in Dublin, Limerick, Brooklyn,
Boston, San Juan, Tel Aviv, or Texas.
This year’s Bloomsday on Broadway
will not be on the radio, but will be
streamed live on Symphony Space’s website: www.symphonyspace.org. Tell
your friends all over the world to listen. Tell your friends here in the New York area that it
would be great if they bought tickets and came to enjoy the show at Symphony
Space.
At 11 pm, after the “Ithaca” epsode is
completed, we will have a brief selection of songs from Joyce’s Chamber Music,
followed by Fionnula Flanagan’s 2 and ½ hour reading of the complete,
uncensored final “Penelope” episode, the night-time thoughts of Molly Bloom. You
can stay to witness this prodigious performance live, or go home at any point
to snuggle up in bed with your computer until Molly’s final “yes!”
If you’ve never attended a Bloomsday before, I hope you’ll
give it a try.
Permanent link: http://www.symphonyspace.org/blogs/isaiah/27
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