By Lucy Komisar
At a time of book-banning, what could be more timely than a look back at the trial of nearly 100 years ago where earlier yahoos were upset at the 4-letter words in James Joyce’s “Ulysses.” That probably got a lot of people to read, or at least start the book. And it is the basis for an engrossing and very entertaining reenactment by Colin Murphy.
The play is smartly set at the broadcast “The March of Time” at CBS Studios in New York, Dec 8, 1933. The program dramatized the news of the week, and the trial verdict had been announced two days before. The government was carrying water for the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice. (The Justice Department still does that for influentials, check out its work for tax fraudster William Browder. But that’s another story.)
There had been trouble when Joyce published excerpts of “Ulysses” in a Chicago literary magazine, The Little Review, run by Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap. Subscribers complained about a masturbation scene, and the Postal Service seized and destroyed copies. Then the two women were arrested and charged under the Comstock Act, forbidding the distribution of “obscene, lewd or lascivious” publications through the mail.
Bennett Cerf (Ross Gaynor, looking and sounding very Ivy League literary), head of the new Random House, was looking for a publishing blockbuster. He went to Paris and offered Joyce publication for $1500. He also hired a lawyer, Morris Ernst (a crisp, sharp Mark Lambert), general counsel of the American Civil Liberties Union. Because the government’s expected attack could send Cerf to jail and bankrupt Random House. (Random House and Greenbaum Wolf and Ernst are still around.)
Smartly, Ernst arranged to have a single book sent through customs, so the case would be about the seizure of that book, not the publication of thousands. It happened May 3, 1933 and the case was tried in November, curiously at the offices of the New York City Bar Association on West 44th Street. And they are still there.
We will see a play (scenes from Ulysses) within a play (the court trial) within the play, the radio broadcast of “The March of Time.”
The case isn’t about the book, it’s about readers, says prosecutor Sam Coleman (Gaynor, playing the quintessential bureaucrat). It’s to protect the public from ideas that might offend them. (People might be offended, where have we heard that before? It’s enough to get a professor fired or a student deported.)
And curiously, Coleman argues, “It is not the big words the challenge is about, it is the small words,” the 4-letter words.
But Ernst proclaims the book is a classic and thus could not be obscene. He had stuffed the shipped copy with reviews by prominent literary critics.
In fact, Ulysses is the Latin form of Odysseus, the hero of “The Odyssey,” the epic poem by Homer. Joyce’s characters and events parallel those of the poem, in which Penelope is mourning the death of her husband. But the yahoos don’t know about the Greeks.
Ernst has been reading the book, well, the last chapter with Molly Bloom’s soliloquy. That leads to the best part of the play, a surreal reenactment as dreamt (in this case a stream of unconsciousness) by Ernst, including Bloom being beaten by police as a judge and a cop watch.
Bloom declares, “I stand for the reform of municipal morals and the plain ten commandments. Union of all, Jew, Moslem and gentile. Compulsory manual labour for all. Tuberculosis, lunacy, war and mendicancy must now cease. General amnesty, weekly carnival with masked licence, bonuses for all. No more patriotism of barspongers and dropsical impostors. Free money, free rent, free love and a free lay church in a free lay state.”
As the sex pages appear, Molly keeps saying “Yes!”
It’s a brilliant play within the play.
Molly (Clare Barrett) standing behind Judge John Munro Woolsey (Morgan Jones) repeats “Yes, yes, yes” Great in her thick Irish accent. She is in effect the true heroine of the play, rising as a vision behind the “law.”
Of course, the people (not the government) won then, but only for the moment. Now, not only “Ulysses,” but hundreds of books have been banned by states such as Florida and Iowa and particular towns. This play should be staged in all of them.
“The United States vs Ulysses.” Written by Colin Murphy, directed by Conall Morrison. The Irish Arts Center, 726 11th Ave, NYC. First produced in Ireland by Once Off Productions. Runtime 85 min. Opened May 4, 2025, closes June 1, 2025. (Go here for the trial transcript.)