BLOOMSDAY EXPLORES OUR DESIRE TO RIGHT PAST WRONGS
At least once a day, I wish I could go back. Back to that time when there was a chance to make it right, back to a feeling in the hope I could act on it, back to say a few different words.
Well, in Shadow Theatre's latest production, Bloomsday, I got that chance. It was a sweet relief and also a reminder that yes, perhaps you can go back on some level. But as playwright Steven Dietz reminds us, you'll have to deal with what awaits when you get there.
Bloomsday is named for
June 16, that day among days in Ireland when all who love James Joyce (or perhaps are merely mystified by him) celebrate the author and his masterpiece, Ulysses. For those who haven't read the book, and we are legion, Ulysses follows three citizens of Dublin — a writer, Stephen Dedalus, his friend Leopold Bloom, and Bloom's wife, Molly — through a single day in June, 1904. Every year on June 16, fans of the tale gather in Dublin, dressed in period clothing to pay tribute to the novel.
The play Bloomsday opens as Caithleen (Alexandra Dawkins), a spirited 20-year-old with no sense of her own beauty and power, is set to lead a walking tour of Joyce's Dublin to point out locations key to the author's work. She persuades a young American tourist named Robbie (Chris Pereira) who is hanging about, consulting a map, to join the group — for free! — to round up its number and avoid the potentially disastrous 13 participants.
Robbie and Caithleen share a brief time together after the tour ends, moments full of promise, connection and lust. Thirty-five years later, Robbie (now Robert, played by John Sproule) returns to Dublin to find Caithleen (now Cait, played by Coralie Cairns) to resolve what happened between them.
At this point, I must confess I have rarely read a play that moved me like Bloomsday. Dietz, a 63-year-old playwright who lives in both Seattle and Austin, is one of the most produced playwrights in the United States. The audience in the Varscona finds itself in the hands of a master craftsman who has made the disruption of time one of his narrative specialties.
It's a sign of his talent and respect for the audience that
Dietz makes a complex concept like time travel a seamless journey from past to present to future. In fact, in a line delivered by Robert that will stay with me forever, Dietz makes it clear that there isn't, and never was, a distinction between where we are, where we were, and where we are going.
“Time is not a series of neat single notes we call `the present' — one played after another … Time is a chord: many notes, past-present-future. All real, all alive, and all played at once.”
This declaration, made early in the two-act play, makes it possible for the characters to move together and separately through the day and the years. We see the older characters counsel the younger ones, and the younger ones grapple with the unmanageable state of their emotions. The play is written with a kind of poetic musicality (ah, the Irish) that makes it entirely possible to suspend disbelief and just be there. With them.
Pereira as Robbie and Dawkins as Caithleen are truly transcendent in their respective roles. In their simmering youth, the two lift the audience hopefully toward their best selves. The peachy-pink lighting of the simple set by Even Gilchrist serves to suggest an endless beginning for the characters. Or perhaps, it's just the day in retreat.
Sproule and Cairns as the older incarnations deliver much of the meat of the story. To call them wise would be folly. They are real.
While Robert is the hero of the play, a character filled with regret who takes big risks to find peace, Cait is the most winsome and intriguing. The playwright gives her an extra twist; is she unstable, or does she just embrace the contradictions in a way most of us find impossible?
If art is a search for answers, Bloomsday generously provides a number of truths, delivered with wit and humour, for the audience to ponder. But they won't all be comfortable, or comforting. Know that while there is much talk of sunshine in the play, Cait carries an umbrella.
“A sunny day is nice enough,” says Caithleen, “but a rainy one — when you get to ache for that sunny day — that's even nicer.”