Two years after I ended my first run on the Heartwood boards, I find myself back in coastal Maine performing in a staged reading of Bloomsday by Steven Dietz.
Directed by Griff Braley and featuring the talents of Deirdre Manning, Mary Fraser and Cliff Blake, this is a play that… well, it’s a bit trippy to explain, but it’s a play that examines the choices we make and whether or not it’s truly possible to go back and alter our timelines. Fate is a huge theme, and yes there’s a fair bit of “time traveling”, but what makes it so effective to me is that it’s really about the crushing hope of that first love.
Oh, and it is set in Dublin and uses James Joyce’s novel Ulysses as the lens through which to view the story. Characters quote the novel, reference is a hundred times, and though I’ve never read Ulysses I have to imagine Steven Dietz has modeled his characters off of Joyce’s. The date in the play is even June 16, which if you happen to be an English lit nerd, is the date in which the action of Ulysses take place.
After the novel became a smash, that date has become known as “Bloomsday” and has become a giant festival celebrating Joyce and his exaltation of Ireland and the city of Dublin. (The name comes from the central characters of the book – Leo and Molly Bloom). While you can find parades all over the world, it’s the one in Dublin that is the biggest and where folks dress up in Edwardian clothing and walk the same route that Leo Bloom does in the novel, ducking in and out of shops and pubs.
Sounds right up my alley and while I am aware that Ulysses is a “doorstop of a book”, I’d like to take a crack at it. This play, Bloomsday, has enlightened me to what is often hailed at the greatest novel of the 20th century; quite the reputation! For now, however, I will be content and privileged to read/perform this intimate (and yet heavy) little play.
