The Select
(The Sun Also Rises)

A stage littered with liquor bottles and cafe chairs seamlessly transforms itself from the bistros of Paris to the banks of the Irati River; a long bar table roars to life and charges a champion matador; an out-of-control dance party takes off during a night of nonstop revelry. As the story winds its way through France and Spain and lands in Pamplona where bullfighting and the fiesta rage in the streets, Hemingway’s narrator carries the heavy burdens of a war injury and his inability to have the woman he loves; a woman whose amorous escapades he follows with bemused but painful fatalism.

The Select (The Sun Also Rises) is a co-production of ERS and New York Theatre Workshop. It was commissioned by the Ringling International Arts Festival, John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, Sarasota, FL, in association with the Baryshnikov Arts Center, New York, NY; the Philadelphia Live Arts Festival with funding from The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage through the Philadelphia Theatre Initiative; ArtsEmerson: The World On Stage, Boston, MA; and Festival Theaterformen Hannover/Braunschweig.

[It] plays with the tension between emotion and action, the felt and the expressed, the exposed and the concealed, the watched and watcher.

—Lyn Gardner, The Guardian

It’s dazzlingly free and inventive…in its use of music spanning the whole century, and of sudden bursts of wild choreography, to create a profoundly intelligent piece of theatre that effortlessly bridges the decades since the 1920s.

—Joyce McMillan, The Scotsman