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Speaking Ulysses in America • Chris Daly Bloomsday readings

My friend Brian o h-Eachtuigheirn (Heron on a marquee), played the role of the Citizen, sitting on a stool down stage right, reacting to the listing of the national traits he embodied as enumerated in the collective voice of the (actors in the) pub (scene). I was an audience member, I had the usual high opinion of the book and author, the difficulty of which I liked without exceptionally close understanding, but for the first time was hearing the great boozy fun of it. I was learning my culture late and it was easy. As Bloomsday readings go, it was fairly long. On public radio for a while they did a complete reading that was twenty hours or more, with a range of levels of readers; at the Celtic Arts Center reading on Hollywood Boulevard near the heart of Bukowski land, the live actors reading was directed and well arranged by the actor Fionnula Flanagan, and ran maybe eight or ten hours. It was a slightly less drunken occasion a few years later when I worked with the director Donald D to do the cutting and arranging in a six hour version. By then the Center in East Hollywood had been destroyed by fire and we rehearsed in the basement of the stately Columban Brothers compound on Vermont as you entered Griffin Park, and we did the performance in the San Fernando Valley.

Friend Brian could be an intimidating and contentious character (with a good actor who knew, what did you know and when did you or he know it?) but I accepted his invitation to road-trip diagonally across the U.S. towing a twenty-foot Columbia sailboat, Marina Del Rey (LA) to Cape Breton, upper Nova Scotia, picking up along the way in Cleveland, another Bloomsday friend, Broadway actor and singer Sean Fallon Walsh.

As a community the June Sixteenthers (the Great Irish Novel is set on the 1904 summer day of Stephen, the young writer and Leopold Bloom, Jew and outcast citizen of Dublin; we are somewhat more serious (earlier in the event) than St. Paddy’s Day celebrators, if slightly righteous and self satisfied (with our literary hero and our beautiful literary Irish-loving asses) without making a big deal of it. The simple sincerity of our affection hopefully adds some charm to the proceedings. We like ourselves so much, maybe we’ll like you.

Like certain foolproof (somewhat) pieces of music can be played by players of different levels of talent, James J (as Buk called him) worked in its somewhat way for amateurs, but the lines of Ulysses are great for high level actors. Last year I watched swaths of the b-day performance at the Philadelphia library, not saying they rounded up any local who could stand up respectably to read a page or two (as duty or sincerity called), but it was a relief when trained semi- and professionals (a featured one for the ending Molly Bloom soliloquy) were interspersed.

In a scene in New York it looked liked they put on bowler hats and period dresses and went straight for the drink. Spokane Washington has a Bloomsday Race, though the fearful Jesuit himself, who had eye trouble, may have never run a step. I think I’m remembering a good occasion at Molly Malone’s on Fairfax where I saw Brian with life-mate Belinda. There’s good acting talent in LA which leads me to the best rendition maybe anywhere these days, easily found under “Bloomsday at the Hammer Museum”, good professionals doing two hours.

Good actors like this stuff because it’s high level and direct, Ezra said sacred and profane next to each other, add modern and fun, throw in, at this passing point, prestigious. It works. At the Columban Brothers basement I was checking on the pages for Denise Ryan, she of the fourteen siblings in Waterford and Sarah MacDonnell, (pronounced in Cape Breton Mac-doh-NELL) known at the time for commercials with Paul Hogan; Denise and Sarah immediately inhabited the lines.

About the Homer parallels I never worried, but one performer at Molly Malone’s made a good speech about the non-original use of the colonial language. I can’t find what he read, but recently came across, in “Yeats and Decolonization” by Edward Said, this bit of Stephen Dedalus consciousness quoted:

The language we are speaking is his before it is mine. How different are the words home, Christ, ale, master, on his lips and mine! I cannot speak or write these words without unrest of spirit. His language, so familiar and so foreign, will always be for me an acquired speech. I have not made or accepted its words. My voice holds them at bay. My soul frets in the shadow of his language.

The second sight required of the outsider lends that post-modern touch. At the initial reading for the one I worked on the actors were good or at least earnest and then Denise (who rehearsed lazy but came right up as Molly in performance) and Liam Toohey, actor, MC and DJ of Dublin (and then cook on the rail in white offering Leo and Kate a drink at the end of “Titanic”) read and out came the music.   

© Chris Daly Dec 1st 2024   
      - the writer resides on the West Coast - USA

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