GIBRALTAR comes to Philadelphia

-Yes, it's coming here to Philadelphia and I'm pretty excited about that.

I first saw GIBRALTAR at it's premier in NYC last fall and was caught up in it's simplicity and power to so easily render the 732 page novel, one of the most daunting and complex books in the history of English literature, into just under two hours theatre. As someone currently working at adapting the novel to the much-longer form of comics, where imaging and drawing the scenes depicted invariably means thousands of pages to get things just right, I was admittedly skeptical. Yes, I believe as Patrick does that while Joyce's book is a multi-faceted gem with many important sub-themes and puzzling elements, the very core of the work is that it is a novel about a marriage. I was curious to see how such a stripped-down presentation of the events of that marriage would play out in a two-person production. A ULYSSES without Stephen Dedalus? How would that work?

Wonderfully. Because the secret to adapting Joyce, into any other medium, is in letting the language just breathe. There's a shocking number of people who have never made it through this book because they've never bothered to try reading it aloud.

So here's your chance to see what you've been missing. Patrick has captured the ear of experiencing Joyce for this production; he stages the drama, but he let's Joyce's language tell the story. The result is, as far as I'm concerned, the best "first time" any fan could hope for; a production not concerned with the finite world of, "okay, now I understand ULYSSES', but with the expansiveness of, "wow, I want to read that."

True, there's no Stephen Dedalus. And, sadly, no Buck Mulligan. True, the father-in-search-of-a-son issue that links Joyce's 1922 novel to the Odyssey is missing from the equation. Thankfully, the novel is still very-widely in print throughout the world and you have the opportunity to read it and catch up. But Patrick's production gives us the free and sometimes difficult exchange between narrator and muse, between husband and wife, between free-thinking-modern-hero and simple-but-deliberate-everyman-cuckold, a battle between awareness and acceptance that makes this novel important and fascinating 89 years after it's publication.

He brings the language and the drama and the parallax and the comedy. If you've not read ULYSSES, or if you have and are like many others look forward to experiencing it again, this is your best shot at jumping into the joy of Joyce.

Perhaps even better than a comicbook.

-Robert Berry

cartoonist on ULYSSES "SEEN"