Just say 'yes'

Jeanine Kane's riveting Molly Bloom

by Bill Rodriguez

MOLLY BLOOM, adapted from Ulysess by James Joyce by Jeanine Kane. Directed by Chris Byrnes. At Alias Stge through November 16.

Jeanine Kane

It was a good idea for a theater performance -- adapt the closing monologue from Ulysses -- and it turns out to be a successful offering by actress Jeanine Kane. The first of the Alias Stage Interim Series presentations, Molly Bloom is only 35 minutes long, but has the heft and substance of more than just an acting workshop exercise.

The culminating chapter of the unprecedented epic was the coda for James Joyce's new, symphonic sort of literature. The novel was, of course, a day in the life of Molly's husband Leopold, a Jew wandering Dublin, tightly modeled after the structure of the odyssey of the book's namesake. Numerous narrative voices and perspectives are tried on in the course of Ulysses, but Molly's voice at the end rings out pure and clear, like a soprano solo in a choir.

Joyce concluded with five paragraphs over the course of 45 pages, beginning and ending with the word "Yes," unpunctuated except for a final period. Kane, inspired by a year in Ireland, gives us an abridgment and adaptation with full sentences. Half-completed thoughts and repetitions are gone, along with the many stray maunderings. In a knit wool cardigan and nightgown Molly addresses the audience like were her chum, or conscience, and she has something specific to tell us. The structure is by intention, not stray association.

Sleepless, chattering on past 2 a.m., Molly paints quite a picture. Directed by Chris Byrnes, Kane keeps animated, whether stretching languorously on a couch, the only prop, or pacing in some earnest frustration. As in some wee-hours sorority gab session, the subject keeps coming back to sex. Molly is perhaps the least inhibited female character in Western literature written by a man -- and she has been critiqued more than once as a male fantasy. She shrugs off her husband's infidelities unless they're under her nose, as with the cleaning girl Mary. For herself, "It's only the first time" that's special. "After that, it's just the ordinary do it and think no more about it," though she still has a schoolgirl romanticism about how "there's nothing like a kiss long and hot down to your soul." There are comical moments, too, such as recounting a confession to Father Corrigan as a girl. "He touched me, Father." "Where?" "And I said, On the canal bank, like a fool." Kane gives substance to Molly's reveries by putting a love letter in her pocket, which she takes out and reads a couple of times.

In addition to the gains of opening Molly's thoughts to the world outside her mind, something is lost, too, despite the clarity of the now punctuated voice. On the page, as we read the run-on words and figure out sentences from her rushing stream of consciousness, it's like scooping up Molly's thoughts a dipperful at a time. Her observations are rushing before us completely uncensored, not given second thought. Because of that, the famous closing words, Molly's last yeses of the mountainside mutual seduction with Leopold, have an uninhibited joyousness in print. But as Kane performs the passage, the rapture of being in the moment is muted, as Molly wistfully thinks back upon the experience. An irony, then, is that the written word attains an immediacy and urgency that this flesh-and-blood present-tense version does not.

However, the ultimate irony is that Kane's emotionally diminished reading of the final words is, I think, pinpoint perfect. Rapture would have seemed trite. The intensity of Molly's transport as a girl 16 years before ("yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes") can't be denied in the telling. Through the magnifying glass of the actress before us, hearing these words one step removed from their joy adds an extra dimension by that perspective: an aching poignancy that complements what Joyce wrote.