Every day for a month last fall, for six and a half hours, the Elevator Repair Service theater group delivered a word-for-word reading of The Great Gatsby, animating Fitzgerald’s prose in a production called Gatz. The play—which included a 90-minute dinner break for the audience—was a hit. The troupe has now turned to the James Joyce masterpiece Ulysses, though it’s not using every last word. Instead, passages from the 1922 novel have been assembled into a two-hour production. “Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead,” begins Joyce’s story of a single day, June 16, 1904, “bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.” —Jeanne Malle