Behaving Badly at the Select
Last weekend, Judy and I went to see The Select at the Shakespeare Theatre Company. The play is a stage adaptation of Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, one of my all-time favorite novels. (Seriously. We even named our dog Jake Barnes because, as a new rescue, he shared a certain physical affliction with the book's narrator.)
The play is well-acted, well-staged, and well-intentioned. And as an academic exercise, it is a huge success. It's the third in a trilogy of stage adaptations by the Elevator Repair Service ensemble. The idea, as I understand it, is to put on the entire novel -- every scene, every character, every line of dialogue -- with no changes for the stage.
Having read the book many times over, I watched with a feeling of anticipation, interested to see how they would portray a certain character or enact a certain scene -- the bullfights in Pamplona (spoiler alert - it's a table with horns) or that final cab ride between the thwarted lovers. On the other hand, the book has many scenes that do nothing to advance the plot of the story, and I found myself wondering if the play would have been better served if they'd been cut.
This, of course, is the difference between a novel and a play. Freytag developed the pyramid that we all know and love (rising action, climax, falling action...) in the theater, not over a book. Novels have to move forward, just as plays do, but they have more leeway. A book can sustain our interest by probing the inner lives of characters, describing history, backstory, side-story, or engaging the intellect while little is actually "happening." During a play, it's different. The audience tends to get antsy during hour three, watching two guys fish and drink an entire bottle of wine.
Still, the wonderful thing about an interpretation, whether in stage, film, or muppetry, is that it allows you to see the original with fresh eyes. I've always thought of Hemingway's book as a part expose, part celebration of the hard-drinking merry-go-round lifestyle of Paris in the 20s. What this play brings forth is the main characters in all their flawed an unlikeable glory. Jake as impotent and disengaged observer, Lady Brett Ashley as cruel profligate, Cohn as pathetic loser... I must also mention, the anti-Semitism of the main characters comes into sharp relief on stage, where it's not only a means to needle Cohn, but a motivating factor in the entire plot. This is much easier to gloss over on the page. Theres' a kind of frightening prescience that hangs over the entire play, given that it is set just a few years before Hitler's rise to power, and given the current political climate.
After the lights came up, I almost felt as if I needed to defend the novel -- our companions had not read it, and I'd declared earlier that it was among my favorites. But it took me a few days of stewing to realize that what makes The Sun Also Rises great is something that cannot be staged. It's the style -- those famous hard-hitting, matter-of-fact, declarative sentences that manage to leave the really important stuff unsaid (what he called the "iceberg" principle).
So innovative was Hemingway's prose that it could be argued that American literature came of age in the pages of this very book. It's been said (or maybe I said it to myself) that everything in the canon of American fiction could fairly be divided into "pre-Hemingway" or "post-Hemingway." Compare the first two sentences of Sun (1925):
"Robert Cohn was once middleweight boxing champion of Princeton. Do not think that I am very much impressed by that as a boxing title, but it meant a lot to Cohn."
...with those of Fitzgerald's The Beautiful and Damned (1922):
"In 1913, when Anthony Patch was twenty-five, two years were already gone since irony, the Holy Ghost of this later day, had, theoretically at least, descended upon him. Irony was the final polish of the shoe, the ultimate dab of the clothes-brush, a sort of intellectual “There!”— yet at the brink of this story he has as yet gone no further than the conscious stage."
What commas! What multisyllabic words! They don't write 'em like that anymore.
Okay, it's probably oversimplification and a false dichotomy and all that, but if you need an answer to why The Sun Also Rises is an awesome book, it's influence on American prose is as good an answer as any.
At any rate, my brother Paul and I have spent a week geeking out on this stuff via text, and he's turned me on to Everybody Behaves Badly, by Lesley M. M. Blume, which came out just last year. It's the next on my list, so stay tuned.
The play is well-acted, well-staged, and well-intentioned. And as an academic exercise, it is a huge success. It's the third in a trilogy of stage adaptations by the Elevator Repair Service ensemble. The idea, as I understand it, is to put on the entire novel -- every scene, every character, every line of dialogue -- with no changes for the stage.
Having read the book many times over, I watched with a feeling of anticipation, interested to see how they would portray a certain character or enact a certain scene -- the bullfights in Pamplona (spoiler alert - it's a table with horns) or that final cab ride between the thwarted lovers. On the other hand, the book has many scenes that do nothing to advance the plot of the story, and I found myself wondering if the play would have been better served if they'd been cut.
This, of course, is the difference between a novel and a play. Freytag developed the pyramid that we all know and love (rising action, climax, falling action...) in the theater, not over a book. Novels have to move forward, just as plays do, but they have more leeway. A book can sustain our interest by probing the inner lives of characters, describing history, backstory, side-story, or engaging the intellect while little is actually "happening." During a play, it's different. The audience tends to get antsy during hour three, watching two guys fish and drink an entire bottle of wine.
Still, the wonderful thing about an interpretation, whether in stage, film, or muppetry, is that it allows you to see the original with fresh eyes. I've always thought of Hemingway's book as a part expose, part celebration of the hard-drinking merry-go-round lifestyle of Paris in the 20s. What this play brings forth is the main characters in all their flawed an unlikeable glory. Jake as impotent and disengaged observer, Lady Brett Ashley as cruel profligate, Cohn as pathetic loser... I must also mention, the anti-Semitism of the main characters comes into sharp relief on stage, where it's not only a means to needle Cohn, but a motivating factor in the entire plot. This is much easier to gloss over on the page. Theres' a kind of frightening prescience that hangs over the entire play, given that it is set just a few years before Hitler's rise to power, and given the current political climate.
After the lights came up, I almost felt as if I needed to defend the novel -- our companions had not read it, and I'd declared earlier that it was among my favorites. But it took me a few days of stewing to realize that what makes The Sun Also Rises great is something that cannot be staged. It's the style -- those famous hard-hitting, matter-of-fact, declarative sentences that manage to leave the really important stuff unsaid (what he called the "iceberg" principle).
So innovative was Hemingway's prose that it could be argued that American literature came of age in the pages of this very book. It's been said (or maybe I said it to myself) that everything in the canon of American fiction could fairly be divided into "pre-Hemingway" or "post-Hemingway." Compare the first two sentences of Sun (1925):
"Robert Cohn was once middleweight boxing champion of Princeton. Do not think that I am very much impressed by that as a boxing title, but it meant a lot to Cohn."
...with those of Fitzgerald's The Beautiful and Damned (1922):
"In 1913, when Anthony Patch was twenty-five, two years were already gone since irony, the Holy Ghost of this later day, had, theoretically at least, descended upon him. Irony was the final polish of the shoe, the ultimate dab of the clothes-brush, a sort of intellectual “There!”— yet at the brink of this story he has as yet gone no further than the conscious stage."
What commas! What multisyllabic words! They don't write 'em like that anymore.
Okay, it's probably oversimplification and a false dichotomy and all that, but if you need an answer to why The Sun Also Rises is an awesome book, it's influence on American prose is as good an answer as any.
At any rate, my brother Paul and I have spent a week geeking out on this stuff via text, and he's turned me on to Everybody Behaves Badly, by Lesley M. M. Blume, which came out just last year. It's the next on my list, so stay tuned.
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