Bloomsday Returns to Santa Barbara with New Stage, Same Literary Spirit

I have never read James Joyce’s Ulysses. I confess this to James Buckley Jr. and D.J. Palladino, fellow writers and the organizers of Bloomsday, the annual celebration of Joyce’s famously daunting 1922 novel.

With June 16 approaching, now seems like the perfect time to finally give it a try. 

Buckley laughs. “If you have an extra nine, 12 months, sure, no problem.”

Apparently, it’s not a casual undertaking. Palladino says it took him a year to finish the novel the first time. Buckley spent a semester working through it in college. Since then, Buckley has read it twice and Palladino six times.

We settle on a more realistic goal: I’ll start with the first chapter.

That chapter, and many others, will be celebrated at this year’s Bloomsday on June 16, the day on which Ulysses is set. The event, now in its fifth year in Santa Barbara, is moving from the James Joyce pub to the Alhecama Theatre, though much of the format remains unchanged. There will still be Guinness, Irish fare, and literary-themed bites, including the famous gorgonzola sandwich favored by Leopold Bloom.

Part reading, part theatrical performance, Bloomsday is designed to make Joyce accessible. Passages are performed by actors and readers rather than presented as a dry academic exercise.

This year’s venue change to the Alhecama Theatre transforms Bloomsday from a bar reading into a fully staged literary performance. The program features ten readings from across the novel, selected for their clarity, humor, and emotional punch when performed aloud.

The cast includes Henry Brown, James Claffey, Roger Durling, Rachel Jordan Brown, Bill Egan, Emma Jane Huerta, James McCarthy, James Read, Meredith McMinn, Matt Tavianini, Michael Katz, and Billy Higgins. Multiple performers will take on the role of Molly Bloom, Leopold Bloom’s wife, including Susan Keller, Emma Jane Huerta, and Clare Carey.

The novel, which Buckley and Palladino describe as one “long stream of consciousness,” follows a single day in Dublin — June 16, 1904 — through the lives of several ordinary people, particularly Leopold Bloom. 

As Buckley put it, when you read or hear Bloom’s inner monologue, you often think, “Oh, I just thought that the other day.” That familiarity is the point: Bloom is an everyman, carrying around the same mixture of curiosity, confusion, desire, and decency that defines most of us.

“His goal was to get all of human experience into one day,” Buckley said. “Into one book. So, there is sex and death, there’s violence, there’s a birth, there is love, there is a funeral, there’s dreaming.”

Bloomsday itself reportedly began in Dublin in 1954 and has since spread to dozens of cities around the world. Buckley and Palladino were inspired to bring the celebration to Santa Barbara after pandemic restrictions eased. At the time, Buckley said, the event also served as a response to a growing wave of book bans.

“So, we were really using that as a way to call attention to how horrible that is, to raise some money for the [library] foundation,” he said.

Everyone is welcome, from devoted readers who have returned to the novel time and again to those encountering Ulysses for the first time. “Our goal isn’t for everyone to learn the plot of the book,” Buckley added. “Our goal is for people to come and enjoy the incredible diversity of language and styles that Joyce has.”

After our coffee shop conversation, we walked back to Mesa Bookstore, owned by Palladino and his wife, Diane Arnold. It’s quaint and certainly wins the award for the smallest bookstore I’ve ever perused. When I ask to buy a copy of Ulysses, Palladino disappears into the back room — which also serves as the restroom — and returns carrying five different editions. He insists I take one home.

At home, I placed the book on my shelf and began eating lunch, though I kept glancing over at it the way one eyes a box of freshly baked doughnuts. Once I opened it, I suspected there would be no turning back. 

Finally, I set my plate aside, picked up the book, and began.

“Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead …”

Bloomsday, is June 16, at the Alhecama Theatre, 215-A E. Canon Perdido St. Doors open at 6 p.m. with the show starting at 6:30 p.m. There are no tickets for the event; instead, donations to the Santa Barbara Public Library Foundation are welcome.