The Select (The Sun Also Rises)

New York Theatre Workshop

(212) 460-5475

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Elevator Repair Service can’t seem to get enough of the Lost Generation, said Ben Brantley in The New York Times. Like Gatz, the company’s “dazzling” eight-hour, word-for-word staging of The Great Gatsby, this “lively riff on Hemingway’s first and greatest novel” is populated by “a swarm of rudderless young things for whom life is an open bar.” But if Fitzgerald and Hemingway covered similar turf, their styles couldn’t be more different. For The Select (The Sun Also Rises), director John Collins took a cue from Hemingway’s “just-the-facts prose” and created a straightforward story about a group of disaffected Anglo-American expatriates in Paris.

Conventional storytelling clearly isn’t the company’s strong suit, said Scott Brown in New York. In Gatz, an office drone began reading The Great Gatsby and we saw that he was transported to its decadent Jazz Age world. By contrast, Collins’s attempt at streamlining Hemingway yields “rather less than what he began with.” It doesn’t help that the show’s Jake Barnes, our de facto guide to this world of boozy dilettantes, is “played at arm’s length” by Mike Iveson. It’s one thing to break the fourth wall—it’s quite another for the narrator to seem “like he isn’t a character in his own story.” In fact, there’s little that does seem heartfelt. The setting is supposed to be a 1920s Parisian café, but by the final curtain, I felt “like I’d spent three hours in a half-finished hipster bar that hadn’t quite lived up to the hype.”

There’s a reason for that lack of “slavish period authenticity,” said Elisabeth Vincentelli in the New York Post. It “underlines what Hemingway wrote about: a sense of not belonging.” In that respect, the ensemble, particularly “the riveting Lucy Taylor” as Lady Brett Ashley, hits all the right marks. It becomes painfully apparent that these people, far from being drunken revelers, are profoundly disaffected and so are “losing themselves in alcohol.” Where it matters most, “Collins and his crew are completely faithful to the book.”