Civil-liberties lawyer Morris Ernst (Mark Lambert) defends James Joyce’s Ulysses against the charge of obscenity in Federal District Court in Manhattan in The United States vs Ulysses by Colin Murphy at the Irish Arts Center.
Just ahead of Bloomsday, the annual celebration of James Joyce’s novel Ulysses, Ireland’s Once Off Productions has arrived in Hell’s Kitchen with The United States vs Ulysses, a frisky entertainment now playing at the Irish Arts Center. Written by journalist/dramatist Colin Murphy, the play is intricately researched yet undidactic. Featuring a six-member cast from Ireland directed by Conall Morrison, it’s an imaginative, fresh-mouthed account of one of literary modernism’s most significant legal confrontations.
The Hon. John Munro Woolsey presides over the Ulysses litigation, ruling on Dec. 8, 1933, that Joyce’s magnum opus may be published and distributed in the United States.
Ulysses by James Joyce (modeled structurally on Homer’s Odyssey) is a milestone in the development of stream-of-consciousness narrative. In the words of Judge John M. Woolsey (1877–1945), it’s “brilliant and dull, intelligible and obscure by turns.” Serialized in 1918 in The Little Review, an American literary magazine, Ulysses was published in book form in Paris in 1922. Copies of both The Little Review and the novel’s first edition were confiscated and destroyed by the U.S. Postal Service, pursuant to the Comstock Act, an 1873 anti-obscenity statute. For more than a decade, Ulysses was disseminated in the United States by smugglers outfoxing customs officials and postal inspectors.
In 1932, Bennett Cerf, founder of Random House, instituted a lawsuit, The United States v. One Book Entitled “Ulysses,” seeking judicial declaration that the novel isn’t obscene and may be distributed lawfully in the United States. On Dec. 6, 1933, Woolsey, of the Federal District Court for the Southern District of New York, ruled in favor of Random House. After that victory, civil-liberties lawyer Morris L. Ernst, who represented Random House, declared that the “first week of December 1933 will go down in history for two repeals, that of Prohibition [on Dec. 5, 1933] and that of the legal compulsion for squeamishness in literature.”
In the radio play within US vs Ulysses, Margaret Anderson (Ali White), founder of The Little Review, and editor Jane Heap (Clare Barrett) lament the news that their latest issue has run afoul of the U.S. Postal Service.
Murphy’s dramatization of the Ulysses litigation starts in a CBS studio in Manhattan (scenic design by Liam Doona), two days after Woolsey (Morgan C. Jones) has issued his decision. Five radio actors and their director are preparing to perform a hastily written episode of The March of Time chronicling the newly resolved case. (Reportedly, there was such a broadcast, but no recording has been located, so Murphy’s play is a work of imagination.) With the radio performers sight-reading their scripts and elbowing each other aside for access to a single microphone suspended from the ceiling, the scene is chaotic, with lots of backbiting among the actors. “This is radio,” says one of them defensively. “There’s only four directions: loud, quiet, fast, slow.”
Aided by John Comiskey’s resourceful lighting, the radio studio cedes the spotlight to a succession of more fully staged scenes in which Cerf (Ross Gaynor) and Ernst (Mark Lambert) fight to save Ulysses from suppression. Bits and pieces of the novel crop up in Murphy’s script as this vaudeville-spirited production accelerates in velocity, enfolding the audience in a ragtag quilt of Ulysses history, lore, and text.
In Act II, the radio-play actors double as denizens of Dublin’s red-light district, enacting an abbreviated version of the book’s “Nighttown” chapter, in which themes and figures from all preceding chapters resurface in a phantasmagorical dreamscape, with Joyce’s protagonist, Leopold Bloom (Jonathan White), prosecuted by a blowsy brothel-keeper on charges of being a “dynamitard, forger, bigamist, bawd and cuckold and a public nuisance to the citizens of Dublin.” That protracted scene is accessible in different measures to Joyceans and neophytes but, for the latter, it’s a joyful introduction to the fertile mind, bawdy humor, and capricious wordplay of this Irish bard.
Molly Bloom (Clare Barrett, right), Joyce’s principal female character in Ulysses, exclaims, “Yes!”, as she frequently does in The United States vs Ulysses, while Random House publisher Bennett Cerf (Ross Gaynor) looks on approvingly. Photographs by Nir Arieli.
In the play’s climax, Ernst and the government’s lawyer, Samuel Coleman (Gaynor) are finally mano a mano in Woolsey’s courtroom. Coleman insists the court must act to protect the public from Joyce’s “subversion of decency,” the “corruption of morals,” and the “degeneration and perversion of society over time.” Ernst appeals to Woolsey: “Your Honor, to understand Ulysses, you need: a good modern history of Ireland … a guide to Dublin … a history of the Irish literary Renaissance … a copy of the Roman missal … dictionaries of English, Latin, Hebrew, Greek, French, Italian, Spanish, Gaelic … handbooks of astronomy, astrology, theosophy, Psychology … and a decent familiarity with Shakespeare.” Defending Joyce as an artist of genius (and denying that the novel is pornographic), Ernst ridicules Coleman’s suggestion that readers may find erotic titillation in the challenging narrative and abstruse prose of Ulysses.
Early in the play, Ernst describes 1933 America: “the country’s on fire … the Klan on the march again … fascists organizing.” In 2025, with books being banned in U.S. schools, municipal libraries, and even at the Naval Academy, the timeless saga of how Ulysses finally reached the reading public couldn’t be more timely.
The United States vs Ulysses plays through June 1 at the Irish Arts Center (726 11th Ave.). Evening performances are 7:30 p.m. Tuesday and Wednesday, 8:00 p.m. Thursday through Saturday; matinees are 2:00 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. For tickets and more information, call (888) 616-0247 or visit irishartscenter.org.
Playwright: Colin Murphy
Director: Conall Morrison
Scenic Design: Liam Doona
Lighting Design: John Comiskey
Costume Design: Catherine Fay
Composition & Sound Design: Simon Kenny
