2009 Bloomsday Press Release
The Other Bloomsday 2009 - Press Release
The Wild Geese Players of Seattle will perform a staged reading of Circe, chapter 15 of James Joyce’s Ulysses, on Saturday, June 13th, 2009, 1:00-3:45pm, at the University Bookstore, 4326 University Way NE, Seattle, WA 98105. Donations towards costs of posters and props are welcome.
It is late on the night of June 16th, 1904, and Leopold Bloom has followed Stephen Dedalus into Dublin’s red-light district. Bloom has a paternal concern for Stephen’s welfare and knows that Stephen is now very drunk. In the Circe chapter of Homer’s Odyssey, the witch-goddess Circe transforms Odysseus’ crew into swine. In Joyce’s version, Bloom will have hallucinatory encounters with the denizens of Nighttown and confront some of his deepest fantasies and fears, before emerging victorious. This chapter is extraordinarily long. We will perform the first half this year and read the second half in 2010.
The Wild Geese have been staging readings of Ulysses and other Irish literature in Seattle since 1998. We are a diverse group of people with an interest in Irish literature, and most of us are either Irish-born or have Irish connections. More generally, Wild Geese refers to the Irish diaspora, after the original Wild Geese, exiled Irish soldiers and their descendants who served in European armies in the 16th–18th centuries.