The Theater: A Muted Bloom

ULYSSES IN NIGHTTOWN

Dramatized by MARJORlE BARKENTIN from James Joyce's Ulysses

The night of June 16, 1904, Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus went on their epic crawl through Dublin's Nighttown whorehouse district—the cuckold Bloom in his extravagant hallucinations of sexual heroism and abasement, the church-dazed intellectual Stephen in a nihilistic trance of guilt. Although James Joyce wrote the Nighttown section of Ulysses in the form of drama, his triple-bottomed language does not translate easily to the stage. It may need the stability of the written page to hold it.

When Marjorie Barkentin's dramatization of Nighttown...

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