The Select 16-17
“INVENTIVE…imaginative…enrichingly evocative.”
– The Washington Post
“STC, as has become its habit, is hosting a visit by an exciting, provocative company with a well-earned international reputation, doing something really unusual and distinct.”
– DC Theatre Scene
“SMASHINGLY theatrical…brilliantly inventive”
– DC Metro Theater Arts
“this show is truly wonderful…a lively riff on Hemingway’s first and greatest novel.”
– The New York Times
“Probably the last things that come to mind when thinking about Ernest Hemingway are ‘laughs’ and ‘awesome dance moves.’ And yet there are plenty of both during The Select (The Sun Also Rises), Elevator Repair Service’s stage version of Papa’s iconic novel of desperate boozing, canoodling and bullfighting.”
– New York Post
The Select (The Sun Also Rises) was initially produced by Elevator Repair Service and New York Theatre Workshop.
A stage littered with liquor bottles and café chairs seamlessly transforms itself from the bistros of Paris to the banks of the Irati River; a long bar table roars to life and charges a champion matador; an out-of-control dance party takes off during a night of nonstop revelry. As the story winds its way through France and Spain and lands in Pamplona where bullfighting and the fiesta rage in the streets, Hemingway’s narrator carries the heavy burdens of a war injury and his inability to have the woman he loves; a woman whose amorous escapades he follows with bemused but painful fatalism.
Created by acclaimed theatre ensemble Elevator Repair Service, The Select (The Sun Also Rises) is the third in a trilogy of literary adaptations along with Gatz (The Great Gatsby) and The Sound and the Fury. Following the success of Headlong’s 1984 and the National Theatre of Scotland’s Dunsinane, STC presents another innovative production that reimagines a classic story through the fusion of artistic forms.
The Select (The Sun Also Rises) is a co-production of Elevator Repair Service and New York Theatre Workshop. It was commissioned by the Ringling International Arts Festival, John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, Sarasota, FL, in association with the Baryshnikov Arts Center, New York, NY; the Philadelphia Live Arts Festival with funding from The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage through the Philadelphia Theatre Initiative; ArtsEmerson: The World On Stage, Boston, MA; and Festival Theaterformen Hannover/Braunschweig.