Review: ‘The Sound and the Fury,’ Elevator Repair Service’s Take on Faulkner

By Ben Brantley

Time flies and crawls, warps and balances, melts and freezes. It passes by before you know it and it stands still forever. All those contradictory kinetic clichés are pulsing away in Elevator Repair Service’s mesmerizing “The Sound and the Fury,” which opened on Thursday night at the Public Theater.

Adapted from the opening section of William Faulkner’s 1929 novel — the chapter titled “April Seventh, 1928” —this sprawling but surreally symmetrical production dares to try to capture onstage one of the most dizzyingly subjective points of view ever committed to print. For the narrator here is a man with the mind of a child, someone who, as another character describes him, has “been 3 years old 30 years.”

This man-child’s name is Benjamin, though it was once Maury, and a lot of people call him Benjy. Trying to figure out what Benjy knows has been the bane and delight of countless modern comp-lit students. Many a densely written book has been devoted to Benjy’s way with words, which is a lot less arbitrary than it seems.

But as far as I know, Elevator Repair Service is the first theater company to transform everything that’s said, thought and done in “April Seventh, 1928” into a sustained theatrical spectacle. I saw an earlier version of this “Sound and the Fury” at the New York Theater Workshop seven years ago.

Directed by John Collins, the production has grown bigger and richer in its current incarnation. It is more sprawling than I remember, and may have lost a bit of its hypnotic focus. But it remains as mystifying and enlightening as one of those dreams that seem to explain everything for as long as you’re asleep.

Excerpt from “Review: ‘The Sound and the Fury,’ Elevator Repair Service’s Take on Faulkner” by Ben Brantley. Read the full article here.