Performing the Novel

Elevator Repair Service, The Sound and the Fury (April Seventh, 1928), by William Faulkner, directed by John Collins, New York Theatre Workshop, NY, April 29–June 1, 2008.

Theatre has ever been a phenomenon that takes the written word and transposes it onto the stage. A species of theatre that grapples hard with the written word is adaptation: how to take a story (often today the novel or short story though earlier epic poetry or myth) and transform it for the possibilities and constraints of live actors working before our eyes. What fans of a certain novel regard as its strengths—the luxurious literary form itself, the beauty of the language, the special consciousness evident in fashioning the narrative in specific ways—may be lost as it is edited to a few suggestive scenes.

Elevator Repair Service (“ERS”), a New York–based group founded in 1991, does not adapt in any traditional sense in its presentation of William Faulkner’s canonic novel The Sound and the Fury. ERS performs the reading of the novel. Its ensemble takes the fragments of characters and text and places them self-consciously and ironically on view. We are always aware of the performers, the stage, and a text in transition. Mistakes—a fall or a collision with the set—are inserted into this extremely rehearsed performance to create the illusion of spontaneity and preserve the gap between the audience and the stage. The performance style is uniformly loose, emotionally disengaged, comfortable and yet distant.

Subtracting an important layer of complexity, ERS presents only one of the four parts of Faulkner’s novel, which deals with the saga of the Compsons, a white family sliding down the social heap in the lingering, early-twentieth century aftermath of the Civil War. As indicated by the projected text with which the performance opens, rather than an adaptation of this section of the novel, the events “are presented here in the order that Benjy recalls them, exactly as written.” “Exactly as written.” Indeed, ERS skips not a word of the text of this section though it varies the mode of presentation. The fastidiousness of its literary devotion and its literalism is evident as the novel is read verbatim during the opening scene, at various points throughout and at the conclusion of the show. A dog-eared paperback of the novel is handed off, tossed onto the floor and sometimes thrown from one member of the ERS ensemble to another, as they take turns reading to us, as if to remind us of that phrase: “exactly as written.” An actor, who also sometimes plays Benjy’s sister Candace, often reads the novel through a microphone, her soothing voice through the amplification taking us a step further away from theatre and toward the text “exactly as written.”

This literalism or literary-ism prevents any naive illusionism from taking hold. Characters speak their dialogue, adding “he said” or “Dilsey said.” The artifice of the text keeps us at an interesting distance. At times, the reading of the text or recitation of the dialogue or the projection of selected text from the novel is separated from the enactment of the scene. At other times, duplicates of a character are personified on the stage, demonstrating the parallel narratives of Benjy’s fragmented story but also making us think about what the performance is doing with the text.

Before the lights go up we are allowed some time to get used to David Zinn’s interior designed for the show, a plausible replication of the Compson family home with tattered overstuffed chairs, a dining area, two foyers, a Christmas tree; the interior is painted a moody, drab shade of dark green. The furniture is a hodgepodge of styles and fabrics, befitting the Compson’s depressed economic situation. Zinn, consistent with the habits of ERS, salvaged the furniture from thrift stores and the like. Some care has been taken to wear the stained floorboards of the Compson’s home.

The novel’s four parts are told from the points of view of four members of the Compson household. Faulkner, as every unaided reader of the...