The Sound And The Fury

The Sound and the Fury (April Seventh, 1928) Directed by John Collins Created by Elevator Repair Service New York Theatre Workshop April 15–June 1, 2008 I have been reviewing New York theater for nearly a decade, but last month was the first time I saw a production by Elevator Repair Service. And, despite graduating from university magna cum laude, I had never read any Faulkner. So while reading this review, do consider the source. That stated, the recent production of “The Sound and the Fury (April Seventh, 1928)” was certainly of a high intellectual caliber but an agonizing theatrical one. My colleagues at nearly all of our fair city’s magazines and newspapers broke into rhapsodic praise over ERS’s live interpretation of this American literary masterpiece. Looking back on my program from the evening, I found a note I had I wrote to my companion during Act II: KILL ME PLEASE. Maybe I’m not as swift as I pride myself on being, or maybe artistic masturbation just doesn’t make good theater. Since 1991, the Elevator Repair Service has created theatrical amalgams from established literature to found texts, through slapstick comedy to intellectual pathos, all in a great effort to elicit the stories’ deepest meanings. Their 2006 production of “Gatz”, a six-hour verbatim reading of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby”, drew raves from European critics and scored a lot of positive ink in the States (even if the Fitzgerald Estate has still barred a New York City production). Their newest ensemble creation, “The Sound and the Fury”, is set in the picturesque home of the Compson family in 1928, as staged in beautiful detail (and some anachronistic Christmas tree lights) by David Zinn. Tackling only the first section of the complex and experimental novel, the cast faithfully tells Faulkner’s tale through Benjy, the family’s 33-year-old mentally disabled son, played primarily by Susie Sokol.

A doctoral project-cum-play, this production is touched with brilliance and an obvious heap of elbow grease. The cast of 12 spent months creating this chaotic symphony under the esoteric direction of John Collins. As peripatetic as Faulkner’s original text—jumping without warning from one of Benjy’s memories to another—ERS further muddles things by swapping in actors willy-nilly for the various characters. At one moment, Benjy’s mother Caroline Compson is played by a white female, the next, a black man, the next, a gay white male. The heavy Southern tale is shot through with bits of random choreography underscored by peppy strains of bluegrass. There are moments of levity and humor, but there is no getting around the weighty subject matter. The Compson’s declining social status in the post-Civil War years is only worsened by their accumulating badges of family shame: a daughter pregnant out of wedlock, an “idiot” child, a suicide, and a faltering supremacy over their black servants. Another theatrical tick that only further complicates a very complicated story is the delivery of the lines. The actress (or actor, or whomever for that moment) playing Benjy’s sister Caddy, for example, will read from the sections of the book not from Benjy’s perspective. Case in point: “Uncle Maury said to not let anybody see us, so we better stoop over, Caddy said.” The preponderance of “Virgil saids”, “Caddy saids” and on and on and on, started to give me a migraine. Yes, yes, Mr. Collins, I know it’s your clever theatrical device, but you are driving the audience mad. (Or is that your devious plan?) While the actors flow through characters like water down the Mississippi, some spend more time as them that others. Susie Sokol plays Benjy for most of the show with welcome silence, while Mike Iveson, as his Uncle Maury is as creepy as you’d imagine a crazy Mississippi uncle to be. Matt Tierney’s atmospheric sound design was also a reliable presence throughout. If you wade through the muck of Benjy’s mind and the expressionistic overlay of the production, you can find a fascinating vista of existence through someone else’s eyes. As Hamlet said, “the time is out of joint”, and being put in that unsettled place makes the audience (who hasn’t left the theater screaming) wonder what memories are, how they shape our existences, and who each of us would be if those thoughts were simply reshuffled in our heads. This ultra -stylized direction makes the watcher feel as if she is crazy or mentally disabled, certainly one of the triggers that made the novel so, um, novel. Macbeth thought that life was “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” While this particular tale is not told by an idiot, it is full of sound and is, more often than not, completely infuriating. Kerri Allen is a New York City-based arts writer and theater critic. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Time Out New York, Back Stage, American Theatre Magazine, among others. She is a member of the Executive Committee of the International Association of Theatre Critics.