The Novelization of Great Theater

By Eric Minton

In what looks like a spacious bar, with portraits of pugilists and bullfighters on the walls, wine bottles lining the shelves, and two four-chair-length tables in the middle of the room, a woman sits at one table drinking and a man seemingly tends the bar. Another man strolls in, the bartender joins him. Both sit, the bartender in the middle of the stage, the other man near the stage skirt. It’s he who speaks. “Robert Cohn was once middleweight boxing champion of Princeton,” he says, addressing the audience and pointing back to the man who had been behind the bar. “Do not think that I am very much impressed by that as a boxing title, but it meant a lot to Cohn.”

These two sentences are the first in Ernest Hemingway’s 1926 novel, The Sun Also Rises. We are about to hear and see the book exactly as Hemingway wrote it, though trimmed to fit into just over three hours’ traffic on the stage (including a 15-minute intermission). The man speaking is Mike Iveson playing Jake Barnes, the novel’s protagonist and narrator. In addition to descriptive prose, Jake inserts even the “I said,” and “he said,” attributions in the dialogue. At first—and in my description here—this might seem to be nothing more than storybook reading with actors providing the tale’s visuals rather than pictures to show the assembled crowd.

However, The Select (The Sun Also Rises) is less about Hemingway than it is the Elevator Repair Service (ERS), the cutting-edge New York theater company staging this production in a month-long residence at the Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington, D.C. The Select (The Sun Also Rises) premiered at Scotland’s Edinburgh International Festival in 2010 as the third of ERS’s literary trilogy (following Gatz, a 2006 staging of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, and the opening chapter of William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury in 2008).

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