Elevator Repair Service’s The Select (The Sun Also Rises) at STC (review)

By Christopher Henley

Three hours and ten minutes breeze by in The Select, Elevator Repair Service’s delightfully inventive riff on Ernest Hemingway’s classic novel The Sun Also Rises. I thoroughly enjoyed it, am extremely pleased to have seen it, and would recommend it highly, even if the experience was occasionally frustrating.

ERS’s clever storytelling at times feels somewhat out-of-sync with the characters, moods, and style of the original. That said, this hybrid Hemingway is replete with its own satisfactions, and ends up being a tribute that, while not slavishly authentic to the novel, does capture much of its essence.

Like the company’s previous literary adaptations, all the words we hear are from the source material. Some of the staging, though, tweaks the original in ways informed by contemporary attitudes and by downtown aesthetics.

ERS is a twenty-five year old NYC-based company that had a break-out hit with its seven-hour stage version of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. (That was called Gatz.) They followed up with The Sound and the Fury, in which one long chapter from William Faulkner’s masterpiece was staged.

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