Colin Murphy’s play The United States vs Ulysses will have its US premiere at the Irish Arts Center, NYC, from April 28 to June 1, and will be published by Bloomsbury Methuen.

The United States vs Ulysses ran originally in 2023 at the Pavilion Theatre, Dun Laoghaire, and the Town Hall Theatre, Galway.

A shorter radio version is available at RTÉ Drama on One, here.

It’s 1933, and James Joyce’s sexually explicit Ulysses has been banned in the U.S. for a decade. But now, a hungry young publisher and an ambitious lawyer have teamed up to take on the Puritans. Can they convince the judge that Ulysses is not obscene? And what will happen when Ulysses gets under their skin—and Molly Bloom gets into their heads? 

The United States vs Ulysses is a bawdy courtroom drama that tells the true story of the New York trial that liberated Joyce’s Ulysses from American censorship.