The Select (The Sun Also Rises), Elevator Repair Service

photo: Rob Strong

New York Theatre Workshop, 2011

Confession: I’ve never managed to catch Gatz, ERS’s seven-hour staging of The Great Gatsby. I’m a sucker for a Durational Theatrical Experience, so if I had, it’s entirely possible that I’d be writing about that one instead. But it also feels good to shine the spotlight on The Select, which (by my estimation) has never acquired quite the critical sheen and quasi-legendary status of Gatz, or even The Sound and the Fury, the ingenious Faulkner staging that completes the company’s trilogy of literary adaptations. I saw and very much admired the 2015 remount of that production, and other more recent ERS work as well. But The Select was my first encounter with the company, and it’s the one I love.

Unlike the Faulkner and Fitzgerald works, The Select is not a verbatim staging of Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. Still, it’s three and half hours long, time enough to cover plenty of ground in detail—careful, choreographed, exquisitely precise detail. Working in perfectly timed harmony with the fizzes, glugs, and pops of Matt Tierney and Ben Williams’ boozy sound design, the ten-member ensemble brings a crisp attack to the hedonistic chaos of Hemingway’s Lost Generation. The production is overstuffed, yet everything is in its place; director John Collins manages to both sweep you up in the breakneck pace these characters drive themselves to, and find time to linger over chef’s-kiss details in prose, performance, and design. There are dance numbers somehow both awkward and thrilling; there is a glorious aria by Kate Scelsa that pushes Hemingway’s absurd gender politics straight into camp; there is the genius of casting Susie Sokol as a teenage bullfighter, and of staging that bullfight with two beer-pong tables. It is wild, and it is sheer delight.

At the center of this melee sits the piece’s anchor and secret weapon: a pair of deeply touching performances by Mike Iveson as narrator Jake Barnes, and Lucy Taylor as Lady Brett Ashley. Iveson, who has reams of text to deliver, shoulders the production with a wry confidence that gradually reveals Jake’s buried sadness; the magnetic Taylor gets straight to the fierce and longing heart of Hemingway’s Manic Pixie Dream Heiress. The production’s final, simple image of this duo—codependent, disconnected—is permanently lodged in a lump somewhere in my throat.

A friend and I each saw The Select and the Wooster Group’s staging of Tennessee Williams’s Vieux Carré at about the same time, and entered into a (reductive) debate about the two companies’ aesthetics. He argued for the Woosters’ cool, formal austerity; I was, and still am, firmly for the ridiculous bliss of communal invention that radiates from every ERS production. (I was lucky enough to sit in on a few rehearsals for their subsequent piece Arguendo, and can confirm that they are having exactly as much fun together as you suspect from the work itself.) This company, and this particular production especially, prove that rigor doesn’t have to be joyless, and joy doesn’t have to be shallow. That is a truth I hold very dear and very close, in my own work and in general. “You know it makes one feel rather good deciding not to be a bitch,” says Lady Brett near the novel’s (and The Select’s) end. “It’s sort of what we have instead of God.”