The worst stage performance I ever saw was If Then, an off-Broadway production about hip young adults, standing around, wearing leather satchels, drinking coffee, and singing loudly about big life decisions. Besides having an irritating syllogistic title that wouldn’t allow you to forget your own poor decision (“If you see If Then, then you will regret it”), the musical’s most memorable failure was its shrill, microphone-blaring-in-your-ear messaging. If Then falsely believed it had something important to say, and wouldn’t shut up about it.
The Select, now playing at the Lansburgh Theatre in Washington, D.C., is another play about disaffected young adults, but couldn’t be a more different beast, and accomplishes so much more than that supposedly grander millennial musical. Performed by the Elevator Repair Service, a New York-based theater troupe, The Select dramatizes Earnest Hemingway’s novel The Sun Also Rises. As you may remember from high school, it’s about a group of American and British expatriates who have traveled to Spain to see the running of the bulls. It’s about the young adults of a different era, the resiliency of the ‘Lost Generation’ after the horrors of World War I.
The house lights slowly dim as protagonist and narrator, Jake Barnes, played by Mike Iveson, launches into paragraphs of Hemingway’s lavish descriptions. Bottles of every kind of alcohol and half-empty glasses are strewn about a pub, a versatile stage quickly transformed into well, lots of other alcohol establishments, of course, but also the blaring street festival, bull-fighting ring, and a beautiful river of trout. Boozy characters swirl around the tangled love interests of Hemingway’s classic characters – Jake Barnes, Robert Cohen, and Brett Ashley. They drink, they smoke, and they dance outrageously, stewing in perfectly replicated 1920s jazz haze.
The quality of the production is proved by, if nothing else, the countless audio effects timed to the actors pantomiming. There’s not a scene change in the entire show, but precise coordination between the actors and crew make such a minimalist stage possible. When a character pours a drink, it coincides with the rich sound of a goblet being filled. Taxi cabs are created from nothing more than two chairs placed side by side, and the sound of an engine revving to life, folding tables become pawing and snorting bulls. It’s clever, vivid theater, and a source of many humorous moments.
Bringing Hemingway to the stage, in all his fullness—not just plot and characters, but also his literary style—is an ambitious undertaking. Having already performed F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, and William Faulkner’s Sound and the Fury, the Elevator Repair Service is uniquely qualified to interpret The Sun Also Rises. America’s mid-century modernists were as concerned with how a story is told, as the story itself. To a modernist, the medium is the message. And it’s clear that The Select was created by people who wanted to bring Hemingway’s theory of literature to the stage.
To that end, those who have read Hemingway and already love his work will most enjoy The Select. (Though, arriving early and reading the helpfully extensive playbill cover to cover might remedy this). True to the author’s work, it’s an unadorned play. If there’s any meaning to be found, it’s swimming like a trout under the river’s surface, and you have to work to reel it ashore.
For all its merits, The Select does have one crippling flaw. It’s far too long. Awkwardly too long, an endurance race 3 hours 15 minutes long. The first half is a smoky, sexy experience. In the second half, however, unless you’re fascinated by the literature for its own sake, The Select becomes a university professor lecturing past the end of class. Granted, this is part of how the Elevator Repair Service keeps itself accountable to the text, and an important part of their project thesis. They performed every single word of Fitzgerald’s Gatsby, and performed an entire chapter of Faulkner’s Fury. This time, they may have too big a fish on their line. If, however, you sit down to watch The Select the same way you would sit down to read Hemingway— serious about throwing back shots of classic literature—you’ll surely enjoy yourself.
The Select is playing at the Shakespeare Theatre Company’s Lansburgh Theatre in Washington D.C., until April 2, 2017.
