Repairing the Sun

 

Thje Elevator Repair Service  have made their name by adapting and interpreting some American  classic novels for the stage. Is there anything about the America novel, or The Sun Also Rises in particular, that makes them a good bet for
performance?

I think what makes then good material is that they're cultural
touchstones, and will probably be perennially relevant as windows on the
American psyche. But more importantly, they're good material for us
because they're bad material for the stage. Plenty of great Americans
have written totemic works designed for the stage. These works were not,
and all three of them have fiercely resisted non-novelistic
interpretations (just check out any of Hollywood's efforts at tackling
them). That's precisely what attracted us to them.

In terms of response to the works, do you find that you are working
with (or against) people's conceptions of the work, or are you
introducing these great novels to people for the first time? How do you
think the audience's knowledge of each novel affects their reception of
your interpretation?

I was lucky enough to see GATZ before I was drafted to come replace a
departing cast member, and I had managed somehow in my American
adolescence to not have read The Great Gatsby, and I felt like I really
had read it when the show was over. I think it's probably more important
to us that an audience experience a great book than that they experience
it by way of our sensibility. If you don't know the book, you get a
fresh chance to fill in some gaps in your American-lit studies. If you do know the book, you get to see what happens to it when it's thrown on
stage. And I do mean thrown.

Does Hemingway have a particular resonance, almost a century after
the culture that he helped to shape?

One of my favorite things about The Select is that our approach, maybe
any theatrical approach to Hemingway's work, almost downplays what he
was deservedly most famous for, which are his formal innovations:
incredibly taut, bare sentences that make you fill in a lot of blanks
for yourself while you read them. Those have been incredibly influential
on American writing, but we are not using every single one in the book,
and I'm interested in what does it mean to focus equally on the
narrative and dialogue of a book that's more famous for its writing
style.

Although the text is often regarded as the foundation of your work, I
notice you use a "choreographic" approach (say, for the bull-fighting)
and theBaryshnikov Arts Center supports you. Where do the physical
aspects of the performance enter into its creation and do you align
yourself with any particular movement traditions?

Any attempts to put a text on stage have to involve the whole body for
us, from small revelatory gestures to full blown dances. We try to ally
ourselves with movement traditions that keep us out of the hospital....

The Sun Also Rises is, in many ways, concerned with the American
attitude to Europe- and Old/New World encounter. How does that theme
play out in your production- a question especially exciting for an
American company performing at a European Festival that, itself, looks
towards New Worlds in its programming.

I think Hemingway's Brits and Spaniards do all right in our production,
as do the two Greeks; the French are well represented, but we couldn't
keep the German head waiter character, so there may be a little Teutonic
backlash....