They Did ‘Gatsby.” But Can They Handle Faulkner?

by Justin Bergman

JOHN COLLINS approaches a play much like a scientist trying to prove a difficult theory. He starts with an untested idea and brainstorms ways to make it work on the stage. Many hypothetical solutions are posed, proved not to work and rejected. Often he finds himself back at Square 1 at the end of a day.

The process is deliberate and frustrating, but also exhilarating.

“All the inadequacies of live theater are exciting to me,” Mr. Collins said. “I like to throw a big problem at it and watch it all fall apart and come back together again. That’s the thing I’m most interested in: figuring out how to solve problems.”

Mr. Collins’s theater company, Elevator Repair Service, has operated in this boundary-pushing mode for 17 years. Among the works it has staged are an adaptation of the Euripides play “The Bacchae” in which Dionysus appears as a thermos, and a re-creation of vintage television interviews of Jack Kerouac using the actual transcripts.

Last year Elevator Repair Service mounted a seven-hour production of “The Great Gatsby,” without cutting a single word of the novel. “Gatz,” as the play was titled, received positive reviews in Europe, although a dispute over the rights to the novel prevented it from being performed in New York.

Following the success of “Gatz,” the New York Theater Workshop gave Elevator Repair Service a company residency to produce a new show, and Mr. Collins wasted no time in throwing a new problem at his actors. He wanted to stage another classic novel, again without altering the text. This time, however, he selected an even tougher project: William FaulknerÕs brooding, nonlinear Southern epic, “The Sound and the Fury.”

“It’s so stylistically extreme, I wanted to shock our system and see what would happen,” said Mr. Collins, 38, who is directing the show, the company’s first at an Off Broadway theater.

Since Mr. Collins formed the company with a small group of actors in 1991, Elevator Repair Service, based in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, has relied heavily on collaboration. Mr. Collins said that at least four members have been involved in all the plays the company has produced; since 2004, when the ensemble started working on “Gatz,” there has been a consistent group of about 10 people.

Rehearsals are open forums where opinions and inside jokes are traded freely. “We say things to John and each other that would normally get someone fired,” said Ben Williams, who doubles as technical director and actor. Some of the inspiration for choreography comes from dance vidoreos on YouTube, and sets are constructed using old furniture found on the street.

This group approach is part of the reason the New York Theater Workshop was attracted to the company. “Contemporary theater is not necessarily made in the traditional way with a writer sitting at a computer, working on a script,” said James C. Nicola, the workshopÕs artistic director. “Collaboratively created work is becoming more prevalent on the creative landscape, and this is exciting.”

To start work on “The Sound and the Fury,” Elevator Repair Service’s members took turns reading the novel aloud at rehearsals to get a sense of how the text would sound onstage. Mr. Collins said he was struck by the richness of the opening section when he heard it being read.

Both in structure and in content, that section – the first of four parts that depict the disintegration of a stately Southern family – posed enormous challenges for the company. One of the first issues was narration. Because it is told from the point of view of Benjy, the youngest member of the Compson family, who is mentally disabled and a mute, Mr. Collins decided to have other characters read to Benjy, rather than having Benjy read himself.

Different actors alternate narrating, passing the novel off to one another when the scenes and time periods change in the book. The rest of the cast simultaneously plays out the action, interrupting the narrator to speak their characters’ dialogue, at times adding their own “he said” or “she said” tag at the end of a line and at times allowing the narrator to do it.

The sudden shifts in time were another regular hurdle. The book jumps between Benjy’s childhood, teenage and adult years, sometimes indicating flashbacks in the stream-of-consciousness prose by using italics, sometimes not. Mr. Collins ultimately chose to have different actors play the secondary characters at different periods of time in the novel. The exception is Benjy, who is played almost entirely throughout by one actress, Susie Sokol.

Mr. Collins said he wanted to amplify the disorienting effect of reading the novel by mixing up the casting configurations, projecting lines from the book on the walls of the set and throwing in dance numbers. But he is aware of the dangers of alienating an audience with too much experimentation. The key to making the piece work, he said, is remaining as true as possible to Faulkner’s words, which is why he changed very little of the text.

Whether audiences can sit through two and a half hours of Faulkner is another issue.

“We’re not purely experimenting with the audience’s tolerances, although it may look that way on paper, especially with ‘Gatz,’ when people said, ‘Oh it’s seven hours, wow, who could stand that?’ ” Mr. Collins said.

He paused for a moment, then added, “I don’t know what people will say about this Faulkner thing.”

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