The Select (The Sun Also Rises)

Last year a theater company called Elevator Repair Service staged something of a sensation called Gatz. It was a six-hour dramatization of F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel, The Great Gatsby. To be more accurate, the entire novel was read aloud. The production came to Princeton's McCarter Theater, but a $150 ticket price scared me off. That's a lot of money to pay for something that you might not like, and then have to endure for a quarter of a day.

This year the ERS is back in Princeton with another stage version of a classic American novel, albeit not reading the whole thing. The Select (The Sun Also Rises) takes one of the Ernest Hemingway's most iconic novels and puts it on stage, complete with bullfight.

The play, as with the book, is set in Paris and Spain during the 1920s, and captures the drunken waywardness of the "lost generation." The narrator is Jake Barnes (Mike Iveson), a journalist living in Paris. Iveson handles the bulk of the speaking--his memorization skills are impressive. His best friend is Robert Cohn, college boxer and would-be writer. He's also a Jew, which will become a distinction for him, and the treatment of him dates the novel some. It is largely left out of the play, and he is played by Matt Tierney less as the troublesome Hebrew than a perpetually baffled outsider.

The fulcrum of the play is Lady Brett Ashley (Lucy Taylor), the divorced woman of British peerage who has bobbed hair and takes many lovers. She and Jake are in love, but an unspecified war wound has made Barnes impotent. Cohn is immediately attracted to her, despite her engagement to a bellicose Scotsman named Mike Campbell (Pete Simpson).

The first act takes place in Paris cafe society, where much drinking is done. Cohn is attached to a shrewish woman, Frances (Kate Scelsa), who tries to get him to marry her. Brett arrives and Frances sulks and goes to England. The gang decide to the festival in Pamplona. Jake learns that Brett and Cohn have had an affair, which disturbs him. It also disturbs Campbell, who provokes Cohn. When Brett seduces a famous bullfighter, Pedro Romero (Suzie Sokol), it becomes the straw that breaks the camel's back, and Cohn lashes out at everyone in a bar room brawl.

Brett runs off with Romero, but eventually is in Madrid, alone and destitute. Jake rescues her, and they share a quiet taxi ride. “Oh Jake," Brett said, "We could have had such a damned good time together."Ahead was a mounted policeman in khaki directing traffic. He raised his baton. The car slowed suddenly, pressing Brett against me. Yes," I said. "Isn't it pretty to think so?”

I hadn't read the book in many years, so much of it was new to me, as I have a poor memory for plots. Under the direction of John Collins, this is certainly a theatrical experience, but I found it to be only intermittently riveting. All the stops have been pulled out to keep the crowd awake--in addition to the climactic bullfight, which has Romero dodging a large table adorned with horns--there are two terrific dance sequences (one is to a totally anachronistic French pop song).

There has also been a great deal of effort put into the sound design. Two of the actors themselves, Tierney and Ben Williams (who plays Jake's New York pal, Bill Gorton) take turns standing behind the bar of the set, which is dressed as The Select, a cafe in Paris. The sound effects are clever, and mostly involved with libation--clinking glasses, the pouring of wine, or the popping of Champagne corks. At times this takes on a cartoonish quality--the slugfest in Act 2 sounds as if it were straight out of Popeye.

The method of reading long portions of the book takes some getting used to. Iveson recites long passages of exposition, and then, when the dialogue begins, will include things like "I said."

The show also doesn't need to be three hours long. It is cut way down from the original, but the inclusion of many portions of the book seems more like a kind of self-imposed challenge rather than as a means of entertainment. The ending, when Jake finds Brett in Madrid, is extremely dragged out. I knew that last line, and I was kept waiting for it.