i am a bad blogger.
if i were a good blogger i would have posted this sunday night, immediately after i saw elevator repair service’s production of ‘the sound and the fury’ at new york theater workshop.
if i were a better blogger, i would have actually seen the show on a night other than the last night of the run so i could actually influence whether other people got to see it or not with my review.
alas, i am neither of these things. i am just a webby - with a bloggy.
moving on.
so on sunday night i saw my first ERS show. i know a lot about ERS - about how they devise work, about how they are technically proficient, and how they extract dances from otherwise mundane sources. last year they did a theatricalization of ‘the great gatsby’ called ‘GATZ,’ which i didn’t see, but heard about. in it, scott shepherd read the entire book while apparently some other stuff happened.
in the production i saw (full title : ‘the sound and the fury (april seventh, 1928)’) various performers read (not the entire) ‘the sound and the fury’ by william faulkner, from various positions and intonations on stage throughout the piece. no piece of dialogue was spoken without having a ‘jasper said’ or ’she said’ attached to it. the piece was two and a half hours long but it felt much shorter.
we got cheap seats in the front row and were ping-pong-ball-swinging our heads back and forth across the wide stage to take in as much of the various, disparate, and at sometimes meaningless action that was taking place. the piece was altogether stunning. it had the most precise video and sound design i’ve ever seen on stage, and all the performers - although completely different in tone and even stage presence - all seemed to blend into the perfect cast for the piece. there were some dances in it that heightened the chaos at key moments and a fun video screen fire place.
my only criticism is that the main character, ‘benjy’ should have been played by actors that were more different from each other. this is the guy who’s voice the book is written from - he’s an ‘idiot’ and ages 33 years over the course of the piece. i wanted us to see how the other cast members babied a fully grown man. instead two mousy actors (one male and one female) played the part. it worked, but i think it could have made a deeper impact if the casting choice was a bit broader.
all in all, it was a soothing experience. that’s a rarity for live performance, especially from the front row.
kudos, ERS.
