And yet for all its worthiness, liberal uplift and pressing topicality, the play, directed by Conall Morrison, proves just how unmatchable Joyce remains. Murphy’s complicated schema, though less complicated than that of “Ulysses,” is ultimately less expressive, as nearly anything would be. Its account of the trial, drawn from transcripts and other historical sources, is but the middle of three shells. The innermost shell is “Ulysses” itself, represented by passages either specifically mentioned in court (like the scandalous “Nausicaa” episode) or thematically relevant to the proceedings (like the fantastical trial of Leopold Bloom, the novel’s main character, in “Circe.”)
The outermost shell introduces another unlikely hero these days: the media. The play is set two days after Woolsey’s verdict, as the five-person cast of the CBS radio program “The March of Time” awaits the scripts for that evening’s live episode. With the help of sound effects from the foley table — gavel bangs, telegraph taps — the voice actors will play all the roles, both in the courtroom and in the dramatized “Ulysses” segments. Even their director will chip in, playing Bloom.
That outer shell is true enough: “The March of Time” was a real program, an odd blend of documentary and dramatization. On Dec. 8, 1933, it did broadcast a segment about the “Ulysses” trial, even if the archival recording, as Murphy writes in a note to the script, has “helpfully” been lost. The loss allowed him to fictionalize the studio scenes and imagine how the show might have presented the material.
Despite the trial’s oratorical high points, the scope of Murphy’s imagination is hampered by the realities of jurisprudence. As you would expect from a case featuring an inanimate defendant, the dramatization is pocked with longueurs, as Ernst (Mark Lambert) and Coleman (Ross Gaynor) recirculate the same arguments while Woolsey (Morgan C. Jones) tries to keep them on track. When it’s not thrilling, it’s wearisome.
Still, the trial scenes are more compelling than the broadcast ones, which include generic theatrical chatter and forced actorly silliness. The cast fights over the microphone and makes jokes about subtext. As independent characters, they barely exist; despite their being devices, our grasp of them is weak.
