| . | 05/04/2008
The Sound and the Fury (April Seventh, 1928)
By: Victor Gluck
Kaneza Schaal, Greig Sargeant, Susie Sokol, April Matthis,
Vin Knight, Kate Scelsa and Randolph Curtis Rand
(photo credit: Joan Marcus)
There are two audiences for Elevator Repair Service’s staging of the first part of William Faulkner’s famously difficult 1929 masterpiece, The Sound and the Fury: those who know the book extremely well and those for whom theater does not have to tell a story or even be coherent, but allow the performance to wash over them. In staging this extreme example of stream of consciousness (minus the second through fourth parts of the novel which explain a good deal to the reader), ERS makes no concessions to the audience. Rather it gives the viewer the same disoriented experience that reading the Benjy part of the novel gives the reader.
Elevator Repair Service, the seventeen year old experimental theater company making its Off Broadway debut, does not make things easy for its audience. Twenty-seven characters are played by twelve actors. Some of the characters are played at various times by up to six different actors. Race, age, sex, and physical type are not taken into consideration. Black characters are at times played by white actors. Men play women; women play men. Characters exit on one side of the stage and return on the other side played by another performer. At all times, using Faulkner’s original prose text, the actors narrate their own characters including “Quentin said” or “Caddy said” at the end lines. At other times, a copy of the novel is passed to a cast member who reads a section in a rather emotionless voice. The experience is something like a read aloud in which people have dressed up and act out what their characters are said to be doing, while they are reading the text.
Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury is probably one of the five greatest American novels, and the author’s masterpiece. It tells the story of the decline and fall of the fictional Compson family of Jefferson, Mississippi. By 1928, this aristocratic family is only a shadow of what it once was due to its racism, greed and self-indulgence since the Civil War. Jason Compson III has had to sell off the family land to a golf course. Hypochondriac Caroline Compson claims to be too ill to bring up her offspring. Their four children have borne the brunt of the family burden. Oldest son Quentin III, sensitive and neurotic, is destined to commit suicide at Harvard College. Daughter Candace, nicknamed Caddy, becomes extremely promiscuous and is exiled from the family. Second son Jason IV is an embittered, angry failure. Youngest son Benjy, originally named after his alcoholic Uncle Maury, is what in 1929 was called mentally retarded and a mute.
The Faulkner novel is told in four parts. Benjy, Quentin and Jason each narrate one section, and the final part is told from the point of view of Dilsey, the Compson’s cook who has had the job of keeping the family together. The title is taken from Macbeth’s fifth act soliloquy, “It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” Faulkner’s novel dramatizes this quote, giving the idiot child, now 33 years old the first section of the novel. However, Benjy is unable to make any differentiation in time or place and his memories depict seventeen separate days from the funeral of his grandmother “Damuddy” in 1898 to his 33rd birthday on April 7, 1928. In Benjy’s mind all these events occur on the same day, and in his tale, a word, a name, an image triggers a memory of a previous time. Making things more confused is that fact that Faulkner uses many of the same names twice: two Jasons (father and son), two Maurys (Uncle and nephew who has been renamed “Benjy”), two Quentins (oldest son and Caddy’s daughter Miss Quentin named in his honor) and two Caddys (the daughter and a word spoken on the golf course that Benjy does not understand).
Elevator Repair Service’s stage version is made up of only the Benjy section of the novel, leaving out the other more straightforward narratives. It is arguably one of the most difficult pieces of American prose, although one of the most important. The stage adaptation of this first section runs two and one half hours including the intermission. Directed by John Collins, ERS’s founder, the play does create some memorable stage images and at times is startlingly able to juxtapose two time frames simultaneously. It beautifully captures Benjy’s disconnected thought pattern in which time and place shift continually. However, for the uninitiated viewer who does not know the whole story, it is impossible to follow the chronology or the parade of characters. And having several actors play the same character at different times does not allow for any continuity.
The only performer who has a consistent presence on stage is Susie Sokol who plays Benjy (most of the time) and no other character. She makes a strong impression as the mute who can only cry or moan when things appear to be disordered. She maintains Benjy’s childlike view of the world and inability to deal with change. The entire performance takes place on designer David Zinn’s interior set with its several playing areas representing various rooms in the Compson mansion. However, this setting also stands in for the outdoor scenes such as walks by the golf course and the climbing of a tree in the woods, which may prove very confusing for viewers who are not familiar with the Compsons’ story. Elevator Repair Service’s The Sound and the Fury (April Seventh, 1928) is a very adventurous form of theater. It will seem like heavy going for those who come to the production unprepared for Faulkner’s challenging stream of consciousness story.
The Sound and the Fury (April Seventh, 1928) (through May 18)
New York Theatre Workshop, 79 E. 4th Street, in Manhattan
For tickets, call 212-239-6200 or http://www.telecharge.com
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