INTERVIEW WITH ELEVATOR REPAIR SERVICE ARTISTIC DIRECTOR
AND THE SOUND AND THE FURY (APRIL SEVENTH, 1928) DIRECTOR JOHN COLLINS

Why Faulkner?

For two reasons, I suppose. We had decided to work on another novel and I had a thing for American literature from the 1920's. I had promised myself not to do another work that was under copyright – after the difficulties we'd encountered getting the rights to The Great Gatsby – but Faulkner was too attractive. The challenge his style represented seemed a good way to shock our system, make sure we didn't just fall back on doing things the same way we had in Gatz . Plus at least a few of us in the company are born and bred southerners, myself included. Something felt right about going southern.

Why The Sound and the Fury and not another Faulkner?

When working on a novel, we always begin by reading it aloud. We read parts of As I Lay Dying and Light in August as well. But when we read The Sound and the Fury out loud it seemed transformed. Looking at it on the page, with its typeface changes and broken sentences, you feel like you're being challenged to solve some crazy puzzle. Hearing the words aloud brought the humor forward much more and allowed the movement of the narrative to make a kind of musical sense. In choosing The Sound and the Fury, I've picked a text that's not only problematic for a theatre company making it into a play (as any novel would be) but I've picked a text that, for many, is problematic as a novel. But this is precisely the reason I was attracted to it. The clash of incongruous ideas is bound to produce a rich theatrical experience. At least that's my goal.

You’ve only chosen to stage the first section of the book. What guided that decision?

There are four sections in the novel and each one has a different point of view and different narrator. The first section is special for a number of reasons: it's got the most interesting narrator (Benjy, who is mute); it covers the most ground (it spans 1898 to 1928, so most of the story gets told in the first section); and it's got the most challenging form. Faulkner himself seems to treat this chapter as the heart of the novel. To me there's something foundational about it. If our research is correct and if Faulkner himself is to be believed, this was the first part of the book he wrote. Limiting ourselves to this chapter is a way of distilling the book and its characters, it's a collection of scenes and images that bring about the rest of the novel. Of course, it was also partly practical. To read the whole book would take much too long and, besides, that was my Gatsby solution and I didn't want to just default to it here.

What would you say were the most challenging aspects of staging this section?

The challenge is to remain faithful to Faulkner's persistent refusal to land in a particular place in time and to do that without completely confusing the audience.

How have you tackled those challenges?

We use a number of tactics. We are making sure to use a lot of discipline when it comes to following Faulkner as he tracks through Benjy's memories. There are changes on stage (some more noticeable than others) that occur whenever the narrative jumps in Benjy's mind from one year to another, from one episode in his life to another. These tactics are aimed at preserving, even amplifying, the non-linear nature of the narrative.

But with that going on, we're also experimenting with going the opposite way at the same time. Meaning: even as we're amplifying and playing in and with some of the most disorienting of Faulkner's tactics, we're also working on ways to communicate simple, straightforward information to the audience. I'm enjoying the mix, right now, of these opposing strategies. On the one hand, we're working on dealing with the novel exactly on its own terms, neither simplifying nor smoothing over the complexity; and on the other hand, we are looking into ways to stop everything and give the audience very straightforward clues as to what's happening. I feel like I have three important jobs: 1) make sure the audience understands that this is Faulkner's text in the order he wrote it (not our adaptation of his text); 2) make sure that they don't feel they have to decode the entire thing as they watch it; 3) make it possible for them to lose themselves in the performances of the words, to actually enjoy the disorientation and multiplicity of the text on its own terms. There's so much humor and poetry mixed into all the darkness and confusion. I really want to bring all of that forward together. And I want the novel to come through intact. It's a tall order.

You’ve mentioned that in this work you have focused on performing and not adapting the novel. Could you speak more on this approach?

I think the only way for me to approach a great work of literature is to deal with it on its own terms. I think there's something very compelling about a novel existing on stage, live, in front of an audience as a novel – not just a story borrowed from a novel or a condensed version of a novel. It's hard to explain. I really believe strongly that theatre is most exciting when you witness a live clash of raw elements. I think that you neutralize the power of literature when you rewrite it for the stage. Forcing that kind of language into a format it wasn't written for is, I think, a way of killing it. If I'm making a piece around a novel -- or a part of a novel, as is the case here – I want the audience to experience first-hand our confrontation with it. There's a strong formal inclination in my work with this kind of prose. I like that it gives us a problem to solve, a problem of resolving two forms: the live performance and the novel. I can't really work unless there's a worthwhile obstacle to overcome. Condensing and rewriting text is not a satisfying solution for me. That feels more like skirting the problem. And I think it's satisfying for audiences to be in the presence of the novel and not have over-determining what they should and shouldn't hear. Adapting feels too safe. And if something feels safe warning bells start going off with me.

How would you say this piece sits in relationship to past work of ERS? Does this represent a shift in approach or aesthetic?

I like to think that our body of work, taken as a whole, slowly reveals our unconscious tendencies. And those tendencies, I guess, account for our aesthetic. We don’t set out to make them conform to a specific aesthetic mission. I'm not trying to make a lot of pieces that all fit neatly together and can be summed up with a concise label. In fact, I'm often working hard at making each piece different from the one before. In that sense, each piece represents a shift. I need to feel like I'm in unfamiliar territory to get the best work out of myself and the company. Specifically here, we chose to do another novel because we felt that it would require a new approach from what we used with Gatz . And I think that's turning out to be the case. Overall, I'd say we're working our way slowly to a new relationship to text. Text was something that I rejected early on. I resented the fact that playwrights and not directors were considered the primary authors of theatre. That has never made much sense to me. A play is not theatre until it's a living, breathing thing, and I reasoned that the authors of the actions were the primary artists of a piece of theatre. But I think I'm softening some on that. At least, I'm beginning to appreciate on a much deeper level the power of (verbal) language on stage. Nevertheless, choosing to make plays out of novels is consistent with that long-held view about authorship. Faulkner is so undeniably the author of the words in this piece, yet they were never intended for the stage. So in that sense, I get to be (and ERS gets to be) the undisputed author of this expression of those words. And I get the satisfaction (and the anxiety) of solving the problem of how those words become theatre. That has always been our project, one way or the other: how does non-theatrical material become theatre? That's our experiment and it's taken us to wildly different places.

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