A five-minute sample of all three shows from ERS' trilogy of theater works based on modernist American literature. Gatz (2006) One morning in the shabby office of a mysterious small business, an employee finds a copy of The Great Gatsby in the clutter on his desk. He starts to read it out loud and doesn't stop. At first his coworkers hardly notice. But after a series of strange coincidences, it's no longer clear whether he's reading the book or the book is transforming him. The Sound and the Fury (2008) The first chapter of William Faulkner's The Sound and The Fury, April Seventh, 1928, is told from the point of view of Benjy Compson. Mute and mentally handicapped, Benjy cannot distinguish between past and present. He free-associates his way through his family's troubled past and longs for his lost sister. An eerily timeless family living room is the setting for the company's romp through this dark story. With humor, pathos and a shot of high-energy choreography, the ensemble brings this infamous literary masterpiece to life on stage. The Select (2010) A stage littered with liquor bottles and cafe 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.
