Mark Lambert, Ali White, Jonathan White, Morgan C. Jones, Clare Barrett, Ross Gaynor in The United States vs Ulysses. Photo: Nir Arieli

It’s unfortunate how timely The United States vs Ulysses, the Irish Arts Center’s newest import, feels. There’s a few real zingers that sound like they could be ripped from the headlines of our current moment, when book banning in schools and libraries is on the rise, with state after state and school district after school district weighing in on “obscenity” and lawsuit after lawsuit rising up to object. “Our homes, our libraries,” says the lawyer Sam Colman, “these should be safe places for young minds.” 

But in fact, Colin Murphy’s play–conceived originally for radio and adapted for a fully staged production–is ripped from headlines nearly a century old. The date is December 8, 1933, and we’re in CBS Radio’s New York studio, preparing to go live on air with an episode of the dramatized newsreel March of Time, about the court case The United States versus One Book Called Ulysses. (That link goes to the court decision, so merits a spoiler alert of sorts, I suppose.) But inside the frame story of the radio broadcast, Murphy and director Conall Morrison nest two other levels of narrative, each depicted with a slightly different visual and dramatic style. 

First, we’re in the broadcast room, where a company of five actors is being directed (the director is played by Jonathan White) as they read their script about the trial with gusto. The trial has ended just a few days earlier (as, coincidentally, has Prohibition), and the risque bits of Ulysses are a clever way to slip in a bit of salacious material. The centerpiece of Liam Doona’s set is a hanging microphone, around which the in-scene actors gather as they make live sound effects, dramatize scenes, and trip on each other’s lines. The actors not speaking sit in chairs upstage, reading their scripts. 

Level two brings us into a more straightforward dramatization of the events being depicted, with a few more pieces of furniture being shifted into the center of the stage to create the various rooms in which events transpire: James Joyce’s (Morgan Jones) Paris dining room, where the young publisher Bennett Cerf (Ross Gaynor) has gone to make a publication deal. The office of Cerf’s lawyer, Morris Ernst (Mark Lambert), as he and Cerf strategize how to make sure they both get their day in court and win. The customs office, where a courier fails to get caught smuggling in the contraband book. (Another scene that feels pointedly contemporary, both absurdly funny and showcasing the hypocrisy and arbitrariness of the morality police.) And of course the courtroom where the lawsuit plays out, with Ernst facing Sam Coleman (Gaynor) in front of Judge John Munro Woolsey (Jones) in Customs court. Gaynor and Lambert make fine sparring partners, but the whole trial is pointed toward one question: whether the purportedly obscene material is going to get read in court or dramatized onstage. (We will get to Molly Bloom’s famous monologue, but in court, we mostly have a humorous echo of it as Clare Barrett’s Molly is sort of a spectator to the proceedings, occasionally dropping in a “Yes.”)

And finally, at the moment when the radio broadcast takes its intermission, one of the actors opens Ulysses itself, and the real world cracks open: hitherto unseen portals appear in the set, John Comiskey’s lighting and Catherine Fay’s costumes become more elaborate and colorful, and we slip into the world of Joyce’s Nighttown, bawdy, scatological, fanciful, and abject all at once. Here, we see Leopold (White) and Molly Bloom (Clare Barrett) themselves, as well as an array of other characters that Bloom encounters, sketched in Joyce’s inimitable prose. (This also allows the actors to drop their American accents, which are of varying degrees of success; the combination of this and the stream-of-consciousness freedom of the language makes these sections feel liberatory indeed.) 

And it’s in these sections that the play really comes to life, with the actors let loose. The dialogue throughout the rest of the piece can feel either a little pedestrian or a little too expository. This is less an issue in the courtroom scenes (which may be at least partially verbatim from the actual trial transcript, which Murphy cites as a primary source) than in the radio play sections. It’s no easy task to remind or teach the audience what March of Time was in the first place, show how it works, and also present the entire episode, and the informational requirements sometimes do overstuff the dialogue. (There really was a March of Time episode on this topic, apparently, but the recording has been lost, and so doesn’t figure into Murphy’s actual writing.) 

Still, it’s good to be reminded of the case for free speech and freedom to read, and hear the argument made so plainly that artistic merits should trump the impulse to “protect” young minds–as we can see most clearly in the theatricalized sections of Ulysses, which have verve and poetry both verbal and visual. Even if Bennett Cerf didn’t set out to be a crusader for the First Amendment, the role he played in this suit still means something to the company he founded, albeit many, many conglomerations and corporate reorganizations ago: Penguin Random House (which, in full disclosure, I note is my employer, so this all hits close to home) is once again striding into battle as a plaintiff in many of the recently filed suits against new state book-banning laws.