Elevator Repair Service — up with Hemingway
Ernest Hemingway’s first novel marks the third of Elevator Repair Service’s 20th-century American literary adaptations. They tackled The Great Gatsby in Gatz, which was part of the Live Arts Festival in 2007, as well as The Sound and the Fury. While Gatz was a 6-hour word-for-word retelling of Fitzgerald's classic, this is a mere three-hour tour of the plot and post-WWI alcohol-dispensing establishments between Paris and Pamplona.
The Sun Also Rises (The Select). Ernest Hemingway's first novel marks the third of Elevator Repair Service's 20th-century American literary adaptations. They tackled The Great Gatsby in Gatz, which was part of the Live Arts Festival in 2007, as well as The Sound and the Fury. While Gatz was a 6-hour word-for-word retelling of Fitzgerald's classic, this is a mere three-hour tour of the plot and post-WWI alcohol-dispensing establishments between Paris and Pamplona.
Set designer David Zinn's wood-panelled barroom ledges are lined with liquor, tables scattered with bottles and glasses. Narrator Jake Barnes (Mike Iveson) and his tragic band of ex-pat veterans, journalists, hangers-on, and the women who can't love them, lurch around Europe, never outrunning their physical and psychic wounds. Matt Tierney's and Ben Williams' sound design, controlled onstage from behind the bar, gets laughs, with intact glasses shattering only on audio, and mimed champagne corks giving off a satisfying pop. But they also highlight the characters' desperate need to maintain illusions, and in this, Tierney and Williams (who also perform, Tierney as insufferable Robert Cohn and Williams in a comic highlight as "nature writer" Bill Gorton) match the book in theme and tone.
Director John Collins uses movement to fill in where words fall short. The tension between Jake and his erratic, alcoholic love Brett Ashley (Lucy White) erupts into a tightly mannered frug. The seven-day bullfighting Festival of San Fermin becomes a feverish dance performed by the 10-member cast, all swinging arms, thrusting hips and flashing lights, signaling menace and ecstasy and everything else. And don't get me started on the folding-table bullfight.
However, while White, channelling an elegantly wasted Edie Sedgwick, compresses a deep well of sadness - as do the other women, tossing Papa's notorious misogyny on its back - Iveson is dry, which is ironic, considering the sea of liquids surrounding him. He recites the famously terse prose, rather than inhabiting its spaces in between, where everything of importance resides.
So it says more than a little about the strength of this cast and production that while Iveson remains onstage for its entire length, he only becomes tedious in its last few scenes, when mano-a-mano with White.
- Wendy Rosenfield