Playwright: Sheila Callaghan
At: Dog & Pony Theatre Company at
The Raven Theatre, 6157 N. Clark
Contact: 773/235-0492; $15, $12
Runs through: Nov. 26
BY CATEY SULLIVAN
Leopold Bloom metamorphoses into a female and goes about his day in New York City rather than Dublin in Dead City, Sheila Callaghan's sketchy, meaningless gloss on James Joyce's towering novel Ulysses.
Here's the thing about Ulysses—It contains the world. It is The Odyssey —a nine-year epic of gods and monsters and worlds beyond the ends of endless seas—boiled down to a single blazing night and day of almost unbearable density and intensity.
In Dead City, Callaghan slashes and simplifies Ulysses ( and by extension one of the greatest, grandest epics ever penned ) into a mash of empty incoherence.
In Ulysses, every movement and conversation marks the tip of a mind-spinning, iceberg labyrinth of subtext and context. In Dead City, every movement and conversation is the tip of hollow pretension. The play is the equivalent of a parrot squawking out Hamlet, only with a third of Shakespeare's original vocabulary.
Directed by Jarrett Dapier, Dog & Pony Theatre Company displays a flair for ingenious set design ( with Grant Sabin's bombed-out landscape of meat-packing district clubs, sterile upscale condos and brutally chaotic editorial offices simply terrific ) and an admirable, energetic willingness to leap headlong into risk.
Would that the company had leapt into a risk worth its obvious talent and verve.
Even for those who can follow the Joycean and Homeric parallels to a T, Dead City still plays as a nonsensical picaresque tale filled with baffling, unconnected characters that move in a ludicrously stylized manner.
At the center of the action is the Leopold Bloom character, Samantha Blossom ( the name is also a reference to Henry Flower, Bloom's pen name in Ulysses. ) Like Flower/Bloom, Samantha is carrying on a salacious pen-pal relationship, only instead of writing letters like Henry Flower, she's flirting it up over cyberspace.
Samantha is married to a jazz singer, Gabriel, who is having an affair with his booking agent. ( In Ulysses, Leopold's wife, Molly, is an opera singer having an affair with her agent, Blazes Boylan. )
The third primary force in Dead City is the young poet Jewel, a stand-in for Ulysses's Stephen Dedalus, the artist-as-a-young-man in search of a father figure and a poet horribly haunted by the death of his mother. Callaghan reduces that fledgling, fathoms-deep artist to a paper-thin wasted hedonist who is laughably obsessed with Patti Smith. The Telemachiad—Joyce's three-chapter re-imagining of Homer's Telemachus and his heart-wrenching search for a home and connection—turns into a trite trope of lurid squalor.
Most dispiriting of all is the monologue at the close of Dead City. Here, Molly Bloom's wild woman affirmation of life, sex and the everlasting 'yes' is a shrugging nonsequitur.