Elevator Repair Service’s ‘The Sound And The Fury (April Seventh, 1928)’

by Eric Grode

The unreliable narrator has been simultaneously telling and dismantling tales at least as far back as Chaucer, but playwrights have been playing catch-up lately. Neil LaBute has turned the notion into a virtual cottage industry — one of his protagonists even describes himself as such. Aaron Sorkin featured a pair of them fact-checking each other in “The Farnsworth Invention,” and David Hare described his interest in adapting “The Year of Magical Thinking” for the stage by explaining, “Whenever you have an unreliable narrator, you’ve got a play.”

Well, they don’t come much less reliable than Benjy Compson, the severely compromised (autistic? retarded?) 33-year-old who narrates the hypnotic first section of “The Sound and the Fury,” William Faulkner’s 1929 masterpiece about an imploding aristocratic family in Mississippi. And thanks to the ministrations of the indispensable downtown theater company Elevator Repair Service, he has got himself a corker of a play: a sensory blitzkrieg that is as logistically grueling as it is emotionally satisfying. Director John Collins has ringmastered a dozen performers and a wizardly technical crew into lassoing one of 20th-century literature’s thorniest passages. By taking a story that is irrevocably, gloriously broken — literally “a tale told by an idiot” — they have fixed it by tearing it down even further.

Devotees of the experimental theater scene have long been familiar with ERS, as the company is known, and its genre-savaging appropriations of everyone from Euripides to the Marx Brothers to Jack Kerouac. But it is probably best known for a show that has yet to reach New York. That would be “Gatz,” a seven-hour telling of “The Great Gatsby” — in its entirety, word for word. Andy Kaufman (the subject of another ERS piece) used to antagonize audiences by reading “Gatsby” from the beginning, but “Gatz” has earned rapturous praise — to the point where the producers of a more conventional “Gatsby” adaptation have managed to keep it out of New York.

And so the company has shifted its unexpurgated efforts from Fitzgerald to Faulkner, employing a similar method on “April Seventh, 1928.” That subtitle promises a temporal solidity that is, to say the least, elusive. Benjy’s narrative whips among 30 years of history-haunted memories, and Faulkner offers little guidance as to what is happening when. It is his 33rd birthday, but it is also the day he and his three siblings snoop on their grandmother’s funeral 30 years earlier. (One character describes the simpleton as having “been three years old thirty years.”) It is also the day his adored sister, Caddy, leaves their Yoknapatawpha County home to get married, and it is also the day a 15-year-old Benjy is castrated. Quentin is the name of his brother, but also his niece, and Benjy doesn’t always bother to differentiate between the two; the same holds true for his father and the other brother, both named Jason. Virtually the only guidance comes from the name of his caretaker at any given time — he has three different African-American minders at different stages of his life, all of them members of the same family.

Mr. Collins has made a mild concession to audiences by including a handful of CliffsNotes-style character descriptions at the very start. Consider yourself forewarned, however: This boisterous, exquisitely disciplined telling is as nonlinear as its source material. David Zinn’s tastefully appointed living-room set, complete with a trimmed Christmas tree in the corner, may promise a straightforward approach, but this promise goes chaotically, gloriously unrealized. Men are played by women, blacks by whites. Actors take turns with most roles, occasionally (but not always) swapping clothes to denote who’s who. Two or more characters occasionally take on one role at the same time. Benjy’s “moaning and slobbering” fugue states are conveyed either by an otherworldly rumble (just one component of Matt Tierney’s enveloping sound design) or by a balletic hoedown dance. All the while, the actors pass around a dog-eared paperback of “The Sound and the Fury,” sometimes narrating entire portions and sometimes merely interjecting the necessary “he said”s and “she said”s.

While this fragmentary approach inevitably numbs some of the story’s more potent vignettes — the funerals, which Faulkner rendered as murky but nonetheless portentous, are treated rather cavalierly — it is absolutely appropriate to the stunted man-child at its center. Susie Sokol is spellbinding as the primary Benjy. Her blinkered submission toward the swirling events proves infectious, allowing the audience to shed any attempts to decipher the author’s narrative. And while some actors receive more opportunities than others to showcase their shape-shifting gifts — Tory Vazquez turns her terse bits of narration into a sort of heartsick sacrament, while Ben Williams and Vin Knight flit between genders and races with alarming facility — all 12 cast members play crucial roles in establishing and maintaining a dizzying tempo.

Put simply, there is more to see and hear and think and process and experience in this production than in any other show in town. It is not an easy story to hear or an easy way to hear it, but it is abundantly worth the effort. And just think: Should ERS continue to meet with opposition from the Fitzgerald estate, there are still three more chunks of “The Sound and the Fury,” to say nothing of the male Quentin’s involvement in Faulkner’s subsequent “Absalom! Absalom!” Maybe someday we’ll look back on the seven-hour “Gatz” as a mere curtain-raiser.

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