Bloomsday at the Morgan Library and Museum in New York City

James Joyce’s Ulysses has fascinated, perplexed, scandalized, and defeated readers for over a century. Now, Elevator Repair Service (ERS), known for its inventive stagings of modernist classics like Gatz, The Sound and the Fury, The Select (The Sun Also Rises), takes on this Mount Everest of twentieth-century literature.

Fresh from a sold-out run at the Public Theater, ERS brings an excerpted version of the piece to the Morgan for a special one-night presentation. Seven performers sit down for a sober reading but soon find themselves guzzling pints, getting in brawls, and committing debaucheries as they careen on a fast-forward tour through Joyce’s funhouse of styles.

Afterward, critic and author Fintan O’Toole will sit down for a conversation with director John Collins and performer/co-director Scott Shepherd about ERS’s creative process and the particular challenges of abridging and theatricalizing Joyce’s mischievously protean, all-devouring text.

On view before the performance will be the first edition signed copy of Ulysses—one of the one hundred copies printed on Dutch handmade paper—that entered the Morgan’s collection as part of a donation by Sean and Mary Kelly.