Theatre in Review: The Select (The Sun Also Rises) (New York Theatre Workshop)

	Photo: Rob Strong

New York Theatre Workshop has long been the home of what you might call Novel Theatre. Over the last decade or so, the company has produced adaptations of books by Dorothy Allison, Michael Cunningham, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, William Faulkner, and Carson McCullers -- not to mention a musical based on Jay McInerny's Bright Lights, Big City, and an evening of readings from Flannery O'Connor's Everything That Rises Must Converge.

The Select (The Sun Also Rises), based on Ernest Hemingway's novel, represents one of the company's less happy trips to the classic bookshelf. It's the handiwork of Elevator Repair Service, the company responsible for The Sound and the Fury (April Seventh, 1928), taken from Faulkner and seen at NYTW in 2008, and Gatz, based on The Great Gatsby and seen at the Public Theater last season. Whatever the troupe's fascination with the key American modernist novels of the 1920s, its sense of mission has failed here. The Sound and the Fury and Gatz were both gimmicky -- I'm still working out why Gatz took place in the office of a construction company -- but they were marked by a certain devotion to the author's words; the last half hour of Gatz had an undeniable incantatory power. The Select is about a lot of things -- false mustaches, magic acts, dancing, sound effects, and some really, really bad French accents -- but it has practically nothing to do with The Sun Also Rises.

My guess is that, as the piece developed, the company discovered that Hemingway's prose hasn't aged as well as Faulkner's or Fitzgerald's. His deliberately flat sentences, ostentatiously stoic philosophy, and hardened notions of masculinity can look pretty risible to modern eyes. Still, of his novels, The Sun Also Rises, with its depiction of literary ex-pats and slumming aristocrats piling up collateral damage on their continent-wide pub crawl, is probably easier for audiences to take than, say, A Farewell to Arms or For Whom the Bell Tolls, with their meaning-of-life pieties. A really clever writer and director might find an analog between Sun's selfish, self-destructive barflies, deprived by the shocks of the war of any sensible system of values, and the young people of today, struggling to make sense of the world in the post-9/11 era.

Instead, the Elevator Repair Service gang has been seized by an antic mood, and the result is more spoof than investigation. Strictly speaking, there's nothing wrong with that -- Hemingway's pretentiousness offers a pretty ripe target -- but the sense of humor on display can barely be called collegiate. (Middle school is more like it.) This is the kind of show in which an actor playing a French waiter sports a silly fake mustache and speaks in plenty of zees and zats. When Jake Barnes, the narrator, and his friend, Bill, go trout fishing in Spain, it's an occasion for goofy gags with prop fish. When Jake, Bill, and an English friend visit a monastery in the country, John Collins, the director, makes sure we see Bill scratch his ass.

There's plenty of stylized business, most of which quickly becomes repetitive. Every time a bartender pours a glass of wine, he executes a little juggling stunt. Every time two characters sit in a pair of bar stools upstage, they leap into them, bouncing slightly as they land. Everyone has been encouraged to make the broadest possible choices. When Kate Scelsa, as Frances, the cast-off lover of Jake's friend Robert Cohn, unleashes her fury at her double-dealing ex, the result is several minutes of such caterwauling that even Jackie Hoffman would be left in shocked silence. In a cast of characters filled with enough drunks for an ad hoc AA meeting, the act of boozing is depicted by an actor grabbing a bottle, arching his back, and guzzling as if his life depended on it.

Most intrusive of all are the sound effects by Matt Tierney and Ben Williams. Every time a drink is poured -- and, in this play, that's about once every 15 seconds -- we hear the rush of liquid, the pop of a cork, the rattle of ice, or all three. Jake and his amorous friend Lady Brett Ashley repeatedly clink the cocktails; we hear the collision of glass on glass, even though they are sitting too far apart to connect. Every time someone steps into a cab, we hear the same distractingly loud, several-seconds-long automotive rumble. The roar of a bull in the arena is so overscaled it resembles the monster in one of Sigourney Weaver's Aliens epics. There are lengthy passages when music -- ranging from period pop tunes to completely anachronistic bebop -- drowns out the actors, even though they are miked. Then there's the dancing -- anticipating a day at the bullring, the entire company launches into a routine that looks an awful lot like the Macarena.

If anyone had anything pointed or trenchant to say about Hemingway or his novel, some of this might prove effective. But, because they don't, it becomes an evening of effects, gags, and bits of business for their own sake, a glibly derisive satire with no particular aim, a revue sketch that inexplicably lasts three and a half hours.

Oddly, The Sun Also Rises, which consists of long stretches of dialogue, should have proved highly adaptable to the stage, and there are moments when Mike Iveson's Jake is giving us the lay of the land or taking part in wounded romantic sparring with Lucy Taylor's Lady Brett Ashley - the novel's reckless object of desire, that glimpses of the book begin to emerge. (Taylor, when not dancing the Frug or otherwise acting bizarrely, is fine as the fragile, feverish, blindly selfish Brett, making us understand why she can never keep her hands off the next drink or the next man. There's a real thrill of feeling when, in a sudden blaze of despair at the 24-hour cocktail party that is her life, she says, "I just can't stay tight all the time.") Tierney isn't bad, either, as Robert Cohn, the professional loser in art and the bedroom, who pants fruitlessly after Brett. But everyone else mugs their way through the evening, delivering each scene with a wink and a nudge. The perversity by which one of the most tight-lipped writers in American letters is rendered via a barrage of noise, gags, and hysterical carrying-on, is almost fascinating. Almost.

At least David Zinn has provided an evocative set depicting Café Select, one of the more popular watering holes in the book, complete with dark pine walls, period photos, an upstage bar, a pair of long tables, and more bottles and glasses than you've ever seen assembled in one place. More troubling are his costumes, which try to locate period details in modern casual wear. Sometimes this approach almost works, mostly for the men, but then how to explain the unflattering tennis dresses sported by Taylor or the hideous frock-and-hat combination, right out of a Roz Chast cartoon, for Scelsa? (Nice toreador outfits in Act II, however.) Proving especially helpful is Mark Barton's stunning lighting design, which uses vast amounts of sidelight to constantly transform the space as the action moves from various locations in Paris to the streets of Pamplona, where a sudden, shocking burst of saturated color announces the beginning of fiesta.

The big question is, Where does Elevator Repair Service go from here? The Select hasn't been nearly as well-received as its previous efforts, and one has to wonder if it will search for material in other eras of American literature, or if its bookish projects are at an end. If so, the time would surely be right. In grappling with one of our most pugilistic authors, they've been wrestled to a standstill.--David Barbour