3 Classic Novels. 22 Minutes. Why Not?

by Charles McGrath

Elevator Repair Service has nothing to do with elevators. It’s a theatrical troupe whose main job lately has been to stage unusual readings of classic American novels. Book in hand, the actors recite the text and pretty soon start behaving in ways that indicate how they’ve been taken over by it.

The group has so far done the first chapter of Faulkner’s “Sound and the Fury” this way, as well as a version of “The Sun Also Rises,” by Hemingway, and most famously, a full-length, word-for-word performance of the F. Scott Fitzgerald novel “The Great Gatsby,” which, as “Gatz,” had an acclaimed run at the Public Theater last fall.

Over the weekend, as part of the centennial celebration of the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, the Fifth Avenue headquarters of the New York Public Library, the troupe presented a simultaneous mash-up of all three novels in brief performances in the library’s periodical room. “The Sound and the Fury,” “The Sun Also Rises” and “The Great Gatsby” in just 22 minutes? Why not? We all have short attention spans these days.

On Saturday and Sunday afternoon during repeated performances of “Shuffle,” as the program was appropriately called, there were bottles of what appeared to be Champagne on the periodical room checkout counter, drained by actors who scurried back and forth carrying paperbacks of one or the other of the novels, or copies whose covers had been doctored to make them seem like hybrids by all three authors. The actors spoke slowly sometimes, rapidly at others, in bursts of apparent nonsense; delivered brief, dreamy monologues; or addressed some of the spectators individually, as if they were characters in the books. A lot of what was said was gibberish of a sort that sounded not like Hemingway, Faulkner or Fitzgerald, but their contemporary Gertrude Stein.

Visitors wandered in and out, some fascinated, others apparently dumbfounded. No, they couldn’t get the July 1947 issue of National Geographic just now, and, sorry, but Vol. XXXIV of The Journal of English and Germanic Philology would have to wait too. There was a stack of recent copies of The Washington Post at one end of the counter, but an actor’s drink was on top of it. A severe-seeming woman in a black dress talking on the phone looked as if she might be a librarian but turned out to be, oops, another one of the actors, speaking Hemingwayese: “The things that happened could only have happened during a fiesta.”

View the original article on The New York Times’ website here.