The Select (The Sun Also Rises)

As summer wound down, I didn't take in as many shows as usual. Part of this is that I didn't have a ton of time. A bigger part is that there just hasn't been anything new to see. I actually wanted to head to the theater tonight but literally couldn't find a single thing I wanted to go to. I thought about seeing Follies a third time even though I already have tickets for next Monday. That's how dire the situation was. Instead I came home and engaged in the great mouse hunt of 2011. The mouse has still not been caught, but there are three different types of anti-rodent devices scattered about my single room apartment now.


Point is, I can't wait for the Fall season to kick off, but before it does so in earnest, I did manage to catch the Elevator Repair Service's production of The Select (The Sun Also Rises) at NYTW last weekend. ERS's Gatz, a six-plus hour show in which the script was the entirety of The Great Gatsby was a major event last season that I chose not to partake in. Here's the thing: I'm not the hugest Gatsby fan. Yes, it's beautifully written. Yes, it probably has the best last sentence of any novel ever. But that doesn't mean I LIKED it. And however brilliant the show was (and reports were that it was pretty damned brilliant), I just couldn't bring myself to drop $150 to spend several hours watching the performance of an entire novel that I feel iffy about.


Okay, fine. I waffled for the above reasons for a really long time and by the time I decided to see it, the whole run was sold out, and I've been kicking myself ever since. Point is, they're back, and this time they're doing a version of Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises (which I somehow never read). And it's not the whole novel. And it's a mere...three and a half hours. So I was in.


All of the text is Hemingway's. His narrator, Jake Barnes, becomes ours as well. Beautifully played by Mike Iveson with a detached amusement barely concealing a wealth of anxious, useless desire, he is an ex-pat in Paris rendered impotent by a war wound. He and the increasingly desperate ex-boxer Robert Cohn are in love with Brett Ashley, a promiscuous divorcee. Cohn has an affair with her that ends brutally for him but barely even registers for her. Barnes continues to be a center for her--she keeps spinning back, but his irresolvable impotence keeps them apart. It's also about war, the "Lost Generation," bullfights and all that, but if you want that summary, just check out the SparkNotes.


Long story short, it's a booze-soaked romantic tragedy. Tragic only in the most intimate (and thus unsettling) ways. It's too funny and self-aware (and real) to allow for a broad moment of catharsis. So let's call it...subtly devastating. In only the most entertaining of ways.


Performed on a single set designed to look like the Parisian bar The Select that the characters frequent, Barnes narrates in frequent monologues while the other characters are given only Hemingway's dialogue. It wasn't until I had a chance to step back and think about the mechanics long after the show was over that I really appreciated how deeply impressive that all was. There's no dramaturge listed in the program which is either a gross oversight or an incredible testament to the director and troupe's collaborative efforts.


For the most part, the largest, trickiest roles are also the best played which is certainly better than the opposite. I remember when Holly Hunter won the Oscar for her wordless performance in The Piano, my mother said, "I don't know that she deserved it. I mean...she didn't have to memorize any lines." If remembering the most text is the greatest achievement of an actor (which I obviously don't believe to be the case), Iveson deserves any award thrown at him. But the fact is, in addition to remembering a hideously overwhelming amount of text, he also manages an incredibly well-shaded performance as our broken, yet spirited protagonist. Matt Tierney does delicate work as the alternately infuriating and heartbreaking Robert Cohn. You want him to be rejected, but damned if you don't feel bad from him when he is. And Lucy Taylor is frigging ridiculous as Brett. It's easy to see why men would fall at her feet, but more importantly, why they'd stick around after she dismissed them. She's thoughtless without being cruel--a woman dancing as fast as she can to keep the party going, needing to find (or pretend) happiness, even if she leaves people lying in her wake. The tragedy is a result of her not realizing how much of an impact she has on those around her. She's Sally Bowles with even less direction but much more money.


This is not to say the cast is perfect. I don't know who thought Susie Sokol should be cast as 19-year-old bullfighter Pedro Romero, but it's hideous casting. It felt like they were going for Cathy Rigby as Peter Pan and got Patti LuPone playing Dennis the Menace. Absolutely nothing about it worked. And to stick with awkward casting comparisons Kate Scelsa as Frances, Cohn's wife, reads like Carol Channing playing Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf. Literally EVERY time she opened her mouth, the elderly woman next to me started cursing. "Jesus Christ. Here she goes again. Fuck. She just...Jesus fuck." I could relate. Related: I can't wait to be old enough to be able to pull that shit off without getting in trouble.


Back to the production. The sound design is miraculous. Normally, I'd say that if you're paying attention to the sound design, it's a bad sign, but here it's actually mixed on stage and so thoroughly integrated into the show in an intentionally artificial way that it just reads brilliantly. And the two dances scenes are stunners--kicking us out of the action and into a more interprative space in a way that captures the joy and also the menace of the era's drunken decadence.


Interestingly (to me) this isn't a show that I left feeling elated. My immediate response was actually that they needed to hack 30 minutes and get the thing moving more quickly. But as I think about the performance more and more, I'm increasingly impressed with what I saw and how rich the experience was. It's hard to say how much of that was the show itself and how much was the source material, but in the end, I'm very, very glad I saw it.