Last Friday, Lori and I braved the one really cold night we’ve had this winter to go downtown and see the excellent Washington Stage Guild production of “Bloomsday” by Steven Dietz. (The title of Dietz’s play comes from the annual, world-wide celebration of James Joyce’s life that occurs every 16th of June, the day his novel Ulysses takes place in 1904, and named after its protagonist Leopold Bloom). It seemed like an appropriate Valentine’s date since Lori and I first met at Kenyon in a James Joyce seminar that spent nearly half a semester attempting to decipher Ulysses, a complex book some say makes a better door stop than a literary masterpiece.
It was our first visit to The Undercroft Theatre, a spartan space with lumpy seats located in the basement of the Mount Vernon Place United Methodist Church. Based on the exceptional quality of the performance I doubt it will be our last. The austere set design effectively utilized some oversized, sepia-toned photos of Dublin to establish a sense of time, and a few basic pieces of furniture to help convey place. At center stage was a monolithic scrim printed with the original cover of Ulysses. It served as both a doorway and and a looming reminder of the play's literary backdrop.
In brief, “Bloomsday” is about a man who returns to Ireland as an adult to reunite with a woman who captured his heart during a James Joyce literary tour across Dublin thirty-five years ago. Much like Joyce’s novel, the play dances backwards and forwards in time as the older couple retraces the steps—and possible missteps—of their youth to share an understanding of the adults they’ve become. At first, “Bloomsday” appears to be little more than a story designed to relive and revive a lost love. However, as the plot unfolds, it becomes clear the play is not a simple requiem for all that might have been if the younger characters had just listened to their hearts. There will be no magical re-write of history. "Bloomsday" is an intricate homage to Ulysses that evokes the spirit of Joyce’s writing and humor, and powerfully advocates making the most of the present before it is past.
As if all that weren’t enough for one play to wrestle with, the adult characters in “Bloomsday” also offer their younger selves (and the audience) a beautiful approach for coming to terms with loved ones who have died. The technique involves “putting them somewhere” other than the last place they may have been—physically, mentally, spiritually or philosophically—when they actually passed away. Robert (the adult) tells the unwitting Robbie (his younger self) how he has chosen to immortalize his father’s life, rather than dwell on his prolonged sickness and death, by “putting him” knee-deep in his favorite river fly fishing in a haze of summer sunlight. Likewise, Cait describes how she has put her mother in a comfy chair with a cup of tea, looking out her favorite window with an especially entertaining view of the neighborhood—in place of the sombre mental institution where she spent her final days.
I suppose one could argue that Dietz is merely constructing a Joycean version of “heaven” without the traditional underpinnings of religion that he so disdained. Perhaps, but I like the idea of everyone having individual authorship over where the deceased “reside.” I like it because it personalizes and reinforces good memories — not because it ignores or obliterates the bad ones. I like it because it steers me away from boxes of dust and ashes buried in the ground or promises of an eternal life I cannot comprehend. I like it because today it puts my brother Joe next to me on a bar stool at The Hamilton watching Howard Jones perform an extraordinary set of music. Vibrant neon green and pink stage light splashe across my brother’s smiling face. In his right hand he holds an invisible drum stick that he taps against the table top in time with the beat. Even though I can’t hear him over the amplified sound, he’s also humming—endearingly out of tune no doubt—kind of the way he did when he tucked into his favorite food. Through the intoxicating music he enjoys happy memories of better times. In the music he is momentarily impervious to life’s cruelty and oblivious to the pain and suffering headed his way. I have so many memories of Joe, but this is where I choose to put him: in a nice club where the concert never ends, the music never stops, and in that “moment in time” my brother couldn’t be happier.
Ulysses is a sprawling epic that recounts twenty-four hours in the life of Leopold Bloom. "Bloomsday" examines a point in time when two lives intersect and unknowingly impact one another irrevocably. The Happy Medium Song of the Day is by Howard Jones—one of my brother Joe’s favorite musicians—and it’s called “Life in One Day.”
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(Please use the comments box to share your thoughts.)