A Lost Generation Drinks Up, Always on Jake Barnes’s Tab

By Ben Brantley

It takes great discipline to stay sloppy drunk for three hours and still be smart and engaging. I bet you’ve never achieved that. (If you think you have, your memory is lying.) So raise a brimming glass to Elevator Repair Service, which exists in what appears to be a state of perpetual and severe intoxication for the entirety of “The Select (The Sun Also Rises),” which opened Sunday night at the New York Theater Workshop.

Elevator Repair Service is the troupe that had theatergoers lining up last year for the privilege of devoting an entire afternoon and evening to “Gatz,” a dazzling word-for-word staging of “The Great Gatsby,” F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel of hard partying and busted dreams in the Jazz Age. Now the company has taken on what might be regarded as a natural companion piece to that masterwork, another tale of the same lost but well-lubricated generation.

Ernest Hemingway’s “Sun Also Rises” (1926) has always invited comparison to “Gatsby,” not least because their authors were friends, rivals and drinking buddies. Though both depict a swarm of rudderless young things for whom life is an open bar, their styles are nigh antithetical, and some of us began debates in our adolescence about their relative merits that have never really ended. Which do you prefer? Fitzgerald’s yin or Hemingway’s yang? The terpsichorean grace of “Gatsby” or the muscular athleticism of “Sun”?

The evidence, though they might not own up to it, is that the Elevator Repair folks are “Gatsby” kinds of guys. “Gatz” was a soaring hymn to the pleasures of falling under a novel’s spell. “The Select” — which, unlike the verbatim “Gatz,” compresses its source in the style of a hip Reader’s Digest editor — is more flirtation than consummation.

Directed by the endlessly inventive John Collins, who also staged “Gatz,” “The Select” is a lively riff on Hemingway’s first and greatest novel. As it follows its restless characters on their movable bacchanal from Paris to Pamplona this production demonstrates the prodigious theatrical imagination of its creators.

But unlike “Gatz” it never entirely wraps its mind around the style and essence of the book that inspired it. It is possible to have “a damned good time” (to borrow a few rueful words from the heroine of “Sun”) at “The Select,” as I did when I first saw it in Philadelphia last year (and did again here). But don’t expect the epiphanies provided by “Gatz” or (to a lesser extent) by their “Sound and the Fury (April Seventh, 1928),” taken from William Faulkner. Like those earlier productions “The Select” sticks to a single point of view. But unlike “Gatz” and “Sound,” it doesn’t play with the notion of its narrator’s subjectivity and how we, the readers, link into it.

The storyteller here is Jake Barnes (Mike Iveson), an American in Paris and a journalist who has been left impotent by a war injury. Jake loves — and is loved by — Brett Ashley (the marvelous Lucy Taylor), an Englishwoman with a title and an addiction to sex. And therein lies their tragedy. An echoing sense of frustration and purposelessness haunts the lives of everyone around them.

Hemingway is now a byword for straightforward, just-the-facts prose, which may explain why Elevator Repair Service has taken a relatively straightforward approach here. It would seem that Mr. Collins and company felt thwarted in trying for a theatrical equivalent of the Hemingway style. Instead, rather like a graduate student who lights on a tasty thesis topic, they have focused on one particular aspect of the novel: the role of alcohol.

That role is by no means minor. (Malcolm Lowry’s “Under the Volcano” is one of the few American masterpieces that’s more consistently boozy.) Few are the scenes in “Sun” (and I’m including those idyllic fishing sequences) in which a character doesn’t have a drink in his or her hand. And this show is truly wonderful (or should I say fine and good, since we’re speaking Hemingway?) in summoning the idea of life as one bleary, no-exit watering hole.

David Zinn’s wood-paneled, linoleum-floored set suggests the sort of place, both familiar and scarily alien, where you come to semi-consciousness during a downwardly sloping night of bar hopping. At the show’s start long tables are covered by glasses and bottles half-filled with diversely colored liquids that glimmer enticingly and repellently under Mark Barton’s lighting.

The uses of those glasses and bottles (not to mention the tables, which are transformed into bulls for the Pamplona part) are pretty amazing — excuse me, fine and good. Equally fine and good is the sound design by Ben Williams and Matt Tierney (who portrays the sad sack Robert Cohn, the novel’s Jewish target). It’s an unending fugue of gurgling, tinkling, crashing and decanting sounds, underscored by music that makes you want to dance or shoot yourself or both. (Loved, by the way, the anachronistic Ya-Ya dance sequences in Paris.)

“The Select” is also expert in its deployment of silences, black holes of contemplation amid the revelry, and in its signaling of passing time and changing moods by the simple rearrangement of furniture. The 10 cast members are all charmingly resourceful and protean. Frank Boyd provides two riveting quick-sketch takes on a raging American and a diffident Englishman abroad. And an electric Mr. Williams finds the sweet spot between parody and sincerity as a self-parodying, but sincere, manly novelist.

What most of them rarely grab hold of, though, are your emotions. As Jake the narrator, Mr. Iveson has a heavy sled of exposition to pull, and he sounds self-conscious walking through Hemingway’s contraction-free, fine and good prose. As Jake the friend and thwarted lover, he comes across mostly as a put-upon schlemiel, the nice guy who always picks up the check and who has resigned himself to that role.

Shadows are affectingly stirred in Jake’s intimate scenes with Brett. But it would be a hapless actor who couldn’t respond to Ms. Taylor’s captivating presence here. Gallant, feckless, frivolous, brave and oh so miserable, this Brett is a triumph of style over unhappiness, who, more than anyone, embodies the spirit of the book. Her affectation, after all, is an existential choice. This might also be said of the novelist who created her.

Read the original article here.