Not a fan of Ernest Hemingway's "The Sun Also Rises" (1926)? Maybe you'll find the novel a little more accessible in the New York-based theater group Elevator Repair Service's theatrical interpretation, dubbed "The Select (The Sun Also Rises)," which is playing at the Paramount Theatre.
If the concept of portraying Hemingway on stage seems strange to you, you're not alone. After all, the beauty of Hemingway's work is in his precise wording, and though this play tries to capture the earthiness of his writing through protagonist Jake Barnes' (Mike Iveson) narrative monologues, even this device fails to do justice to the original piece.
The play opens with Jake delivering one of these speeches, about his companion Robert Cohn (Matt Tierney), who seems only peripherally aware that he's being scathingly analyzed, as the two drown their sorrows in the first of many glasses of alcohol. It is immediately apparent that the dialogue comes straight out of the original book: As the plot begins to unfold onstage, Jake's narration is punctuated with the occasional "I said," or "I remained silent." This technique somewhat maintains the connection between the adaptation and the text but comes off as overly self-conscious.
On the whole, Hemingway fans may be disappointed to listen to the dulcet droning of Iveson's uninspired and, frankly, annoying Jake. As Iveson plods his way through Hemingway's words, he makes the protagonist out to be more of a sad sack than a wry observer of human nature.
Lucy Taylor, as Brett Ashley, offers one of the stronger performances in "The Select." She bounds across the stage with a vivacity that appropriately contradicts her fixation on the numbing agents of alcohol and cigarettes, which she constantly possesses in her skeletal hands.
Tierney delivers Cohn's lines bashfully with his eyes on the ground, but his efforts to convey a shy personage result in many of his lines coming out unintelligibly. Unfortunately, failing to project is a pretty common failing in this play: When Frances (Kate Scelsa), Cohn's spurned lover, delivers a shrieking diatribe, the audience must strain to understand just what it is that she goes on about for a little too long.
The strength of director John Collins' stage adaptation lies in his portrayal of the relationships between characters. Take a sardonic protagonist left literally emasculated after World War I, a Jewish former Princeton wrestler who holds more romantic ideals than his jaded cohorts, an aristocratic hottie with a devil-may-care demeanor, a slew of colorfully damaged characters in postwar Europe, several gallons of alcohol and a lot of sex, and it makes for an interesting dynamic.
It becomes apparent quickly that Brett — soon to be divorced from an English lord and remarried to the poor, jealous and perpetually drunk Mike Campbell (Pete Simpson) — has a romantic past with Jake. The two kiss, pull apart sadly, kiss again, fight and kiss again repeatedly throughout the play. In order to understand fully the scope of this tragic and somewhat tempestuous love affair, you have to read between the lines a little, but the actors do a good job of hinting at Jake's impotency and highlighting how it divides him and his beloved.
The drama unfolds against the backdrop of a wood-paneled bar, the walls of which are lined with countless bottles (and "countless" seems to be the number the characters set as their consumption goal). College students will undoubtedly get a kick out of the shameless way characters chug entire bottles of wine.
The play makes effective use of space. The set doesn't change, yet serves as everything from a bar to a cafe to Jake's office to his apartment. Later, when the gang takes a jaunt down to Pamplona, Spain, for bullfighting and a scandalous love affair between Brett and the bullfighter Pedro Romero (Susie Sokol), the stage is bathed in a yellow light that somehow transforms the bar's atmosphere into that of sunny Spain.
Some of the high points of Collins' adaptation are the music and spot-on sound effects. The sounds of bottles poured offer a comical effect, and the revving noises of taxis driving help diversify the static setting. The music — whether soft jazz, flamenco guitar or French pop — is always suited to the mood of the stage. A dance number to "Les Petits Boudins" (1967) has an upbeat, infectious quality that steals the show.
Overall, the play has some positive attributes but is somewhat of a disappointment for true fans of Hemingway. If you're more interested in theater than literature, though, you're in luck: When the dialogue seems tedious, take a look at what is going on in the background. The bartenders spin wine bottles and act their wordless parts with hilarity, suggesting that Elevator Repair Service understands the fact that in Hemingway's work, what isn't said is just as important as what is.
