Looking at the stage as you enter the Luma theater, the smaller of the auditoriums at Bard College’s Fisher Center, you might think your ticket had been switched with one for a zoning board meeting. Enjoy the splendor of chairs lined up behind three conjoined conference tables! Admire the care with which pens, stacks of paper and wee bottles of water have been laid like dinner settings! Warily consult the large clock on the upstage wall that offers the real time — at least at first.

And wonder whether this thing called “Ulysses” can possibly capture, in a reading, the richness of Joyce’s gargantuan novel about everything under the sun and also in the dark.

With caveats, it can. The Elevator Repair Service production, playing at Bard through July 14, somehow manages to reduce the novel’s more than 260,000 words to 2 hours and 40 minutes with much of its humor, pathos and bawdiness intact. It’s not the complete text, of course; for that you must spend 24 hours at a Bloomsday marathon, during which even the readers may fall asleep.

Instead, the edition used here, though verbatim, is highly intermittent. When each of its hundreds of cuts occurs, we hear the squeal of sped-up tape, and we see the seven cast members blown back in their chairs as if by a strong wind of gibberish.

Still, this redacted “Ulysses” manages to touch down for at least a brief visit in each of the novel’s 18 episodes. These are roughly modeled on the ones in Homer’s “Odyssey” — Ulysses being the Latin name for Odysseus. But instead of tracing the watery wanderings of that Trojan War hero on his 10-year journey home to faithful Penelope, Joyce traces the bibulous wanderings of a Dublin ad canvasser named Leopold Bloom on a daylong journey back to his cheating wife, Molly.

Bloom (Vin Knight) is our sad, proud hero: a cuckolded lonely-heart Jew in a gossipy, antisemitic town. Eight in the morning finds him uxoriously making tea for Molly (Maggie Hoffman) and delivering a letter from her lover; by 11 in the evening, after a day of work and bumbling bonhomie, he seeks coarser comfort from the prostitutes of Nighttown. In between, each time shift resets that magic clock, whether forward or, as I occasionally noted with dread, back toward morning.

I need not have dreaded; under the direction of John Collins and Scott Shepherd, the day moves fast, with few longueurs. Still, it’s hard to know how long a short version of “Ulysses” should be; unable to encompass everything, perhaps this one should have contented itself with less, especially in the busier, thinner first act.

Once the principal story takes over, though, the artistry of the principal cast keeps us riveted. Knight’s face always shows what the narration tells us is happening behind it; Hoffman turns Molly’s moral, sexual and scatological squirming into a comic symphony of complaint.

The secondary roles are almost tertiary in this edit, but sharply incised. Playing both Stephen Dedalus, stuck teaching history to uninterested boys, and Bloom’s sharp-tongued cat, Christopher-Rashee Stevenson embodies their surprising commonality. “Stately, plump” Buck Mulligan is, in Shepherd’s sketch, a familiar, odious blowhard; as Molly’s lover Blazes Boylan, loping lasciviously with the loosely strung limbs of a marionette, he’s an especially awful and marvelous roué. Only the narration, though beautifully spoken — often by Stephanie Weeks, Dee Beasnael and Kate Benson when they aren’t shape-shifting into various Dubliners — feels as yet underdramatized.

The slack is taken up by the physical production, which pushes Elevator Repair Service’s minimalistic maximalism, made famous 14 years ago by its eight-hour “Gatz,” to even further extremes. Scenes are efficiently set with just a prop or two: Dedalus’s noxious classroom is suggested by a fleet of paper airplanes. The lighting (by Marika Kent) and sound (by Ben Jalosa Williams) function as a kind of chorus, amplifying the small world the characters live in, and even the poker-faced set (by the design collective dots) eventually reveals its hand.

But it may be Enver Chakartash’s costumes that best express the company’s ethos — and, in doing so, Joyce’s. At first, when the actors appear at that bland conference table, and we see them only from the solar plexus up, they seem to be wearing unremarkable suits, evoking probity. But with time, as they rise and move, the image transforms. Dedalus is wearing shorts, Bloom a full skirt with complex pleats. Molly’s jacket parts to reveal a lacy camisole, and the large red flower on her lapel metastasizes into a wreath of blooms in her hair.

This is what this “Ulysses” shows us: that however conventional the face we present to the world, lower down or an inch beneath we are all hungry bodies. Sucklers, defecators, perverts, we wander lost within our grossest needs and float on our effusions — not on Homer’s wine-dark sea but Joyce’s “snotgreen” one. Hilariously, we are heroes just the same.