The inner life

Perishable's powerful Sound and Fury

by Bill Rodriguez

THE SOUND AND THE FURY. By William Faulkner, adapted by Erik Ehn. Directed by Peter Wallace. With James Barton, Mark Anthony Brown, Kate Lester, Mark Peckham, Sylvia Ann Soares, and Anthony Estrella. At Perishable Theatre through January 28.

William Faulkner's achingly intense novel The Sound and the Fury picked me up and twirled me around when I first discovered it in college, and when it put me down I knew I had discovered one of the most magnificent weddings of language and interior life in American literature. To pour that waterfall into the teacup of a stage should be a futile if not offensive pursuit. Yet, through an act of time-crunching magic Merlin would admire, the reverential if kaleidoscopic adaptation of Erik Ehn is now being exquisitely directed by Peter Wallace at Perishable Theatre.

This is particularly impressive to me because when this very production -- with set and both on- and off-stage contributors almost identical -- was staged at Perishable in 1999, after performances in Dallas and San Diego, I was in the minority in thinking (and feeling) that for all its acting and playwriting virtues it fell flat, sold-out performances notwithstanding.

Well, this time director Wallace has found theatrical opportunities to guide us through the twists and turns of this time-shifting adaptation, which last time I found "unnecessarily convoluted." If there were no changes in Ehn's text, as I was told, then we have Wallace to thank for the current clarity where before there was head-scratching ambiguity.

The 1929 novel certainly set the stage for complexity -- and there we have the advantage of being able to reread passages. The play follows Faulkner's basic structure, telling the story of the Compton family after their decline from Mississippi gentility, from the perspectives of three of them plus, as a coda, their servant Dilsey. The time sequence staggers about, from Holy Saturday in 1928, then way back 18 years to the day of the suicide of one of them, then just a step back to Good Friday, before concluding with hopeful symbology on Easter Sunday.

And oh what a family this is.

The suicide is Quentin III (James Barton), guilt-ridden by incestuous feelings for his sister Caddy as well as from being at Harvard only because a pasture bequeathed to his mentally damaged brother Benjy was sold. While memory scenes play out behind a translucent scrim, Barton trudges with restrained anguish before a silhouette of Cambridge and the Charles. A marionette represents the slum girl he reluctantly helps, because she reminds him of his sister, who is about to get married.

The alienated Caddy (Kate Lester) doesn't get her own story, only reflections of hers in the others'. She is as wanton as she is spirited, promiscuous in a culture that values virginity in its females as much as it ridicules it in young men -- additional burdens for Quentin. She likes to sit in the tree outside her window (constructed from steel rebar in Jeremy Woodward's stark set design), dote on poor Benjy, and take up with every man who might pluck her out of her life. Lester also gets to reprise Caddy's feistiness in her daughter Quentin (with some verbal as well as visual confusions, of course).

The Minotaur within this labyrinth is the monstrous Jason, perhaps the most convincingly evil villain in literature, played with chilling casualness rather than heat by Anthony Estrella. While his malignancy isn't motiveless, it arises from the Compton family karma like that twisted tree on stage. So cold that he can amuse himself by burning tickets to a carnival that servant boy Luster (Mark Anthony Brown) is dying to see, stealing from his family is second nature to him.

Stunning us as the idiot brother, incapable of speech or even of feeding himself, moaning and lumbering across stage, Mark Peckham snaps in a heartbeat into the dignity of Benjy's interior observations, articulating Faulkner's lucid words. Since the play allows Benjy to wander through each story, the primal urgencies he represents get to echo throughout even more than in the book.

The last word is given to Dilsey (Sylvia Ann Soares), the hard-working family servant -- the only section Faulkner puts in the third-person rather than the first, which allows a lyrical intensity as glorious as the gospel songs she loves. Playwright Ehn ever-so wisely gives us long opening stretches without words, just with her going through the laborious activities of making breakfast, the pantomime accompanied by on-stage sound effects of rattles, clanks, and thunks that physicalize her experience and ours.

When a difficult play succeeds as well as this one, it tends to look effortless, inevitable. We don't see the choreographed timing here or the discarded line reading there, not to mention the moment-by-moment thought-out "spontaneity." I've witnessed countless forehead-slapping "Of course!" discoveries by directors in rehearsals, each of which eradicated a problem that would have broken the audience's thrall. Thanks to Wallace and his fine ensemble, the emotions and insights locked inside Ehn's play and a literary genius's imagination are ours to experience. Well done.