The Select
(The Sun Also Rises) • Press
- DC Theater Scene March 1, 2017
- Shakespearences March 1, 2017
- DC Metro Theater Arts March 2, 2017
- The Georgetown Dish March 1, 2017
- DC Metro Theater Arts March 1, 2017
- Women Around Town March 1, 2017
- The Washington Post February 28, 2017
- Timeout New York September 11, 2012
- New York Times September 11, 2011
- The Irish Times September 30, 2012
- Timeout Boston March 17, 2011
- The Independent August 20, 2010
- The Scotsman August 26, 2010
- The Guardian August 15, 2010
- British Theatre Guide August 2010
- Sarasota Herald-Tribune October 8, 2009
The Sun Also Rises
by Michael Coveney
How goes the old guard American theatrical avant-garde? The international festival asks this question with visits from Elevator Repair Service, the Wooster Group and Lee Breuer.
First up, the ERS has been presenting its impeccable, dry and radically unadorned version of Ernest Hemingway’s first great novel, Fiesta: The Sun Also Rises. Every word spoken is Hemingway’s, and the treatment is much purer, more classical than, say, Shared Experience doing Tolstoy or Charlotte Bronte.
The three-and-a half-hours-plus goes by in a flash: Mike Iveson as Hemingway’s cynical journalist, Jake Barnes, takes us with his dissolute friends from Paris to Pamplona for the fiesta and bullfights, drinking, squabbling, falling in love, living the moment.
Simply staged with cafe tables and chairs, and a stunning bullfight, John Collins’s gently hypnotic production is both a brilliant distillation and a genuine theatrical rendition, with dance moves and a gorgeous performance by Lucy Taylor as the siren socialite Brett Ashley.
View the original article on the What’s On Stage website here.