James Joyce Returns to the Stage

“One by one we’re all becoming shades. Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age.”

So said James Joyce via his character Gabriel in the short story The Dead from his book Dubliners. Yes, to become shades is the fate of us all, at least in physical form. And yet the life of James Joyce lives on in his art and more literally right here on the Vineyard every June 16 during the annual Bloomsday festival held at the Kartharine Cornell Theatre in Vineyard Haven. The event begins at 8 p.m.

This year marks the 33rd time that those who love James Joyce have celebrated him here. Some say the Vineyard holds title to the longest running festival. The facts bear the legend out: New York city’s Bloomsday began in 1982, Dublin in 1982, Arts and Society on the Vineyard in 1979.

This year’s program begins with jazz renderings by John Alaimo and Eric Johnson. Gerry Yukevich will perform from The Dead, a medley of victorian/Irish songs will feature the voices of Katrina Nevin, Buck Reidy and Anna Yukevich with Phil Dietterich on piano. Lia Kahler will sing two songs by Samuel Barber set to poems by Joyce with Phil Dietterich on piano. Natalie Rose will complete the show with her rendering of Molly from Ulysses. Note, these are all performances, not readings.

This event is organized and produced by John Crelan.

Tickets are $15 and may be purchased at the door. For more information, call 508-696-0539.

What better way to end this notice and to entice all to come out and not just pay tribute to the master wordsmith but to bathe once again in the linguistic beauty of his prose than to put the microphone back in the hand of Mr. Joyce, again from The Dead.

“It [the snow] lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.”