Fuzzy Faulkner

Strong performances can't save Sound and Fury

by Bill Rodriguez

THE SOUND AND THE FURY. Adapted by Erik Ehn. Directed by Peter Wallace. With James Barton, Mark Anthony Brown, Kate Lester, Mark Peckham, Sylvia Ann Soares, Max Vogler. At Perishable Theatre through November 21.

William Faulkner's first literary triumph, The Sound and the Fury, was a popular fiasco when published in 1929. A headachingly hard read. Not only does it literally start off as a free-association tale told by an idiot, but its three subsequent sections include the stream-of-consciousness musings of an effete Hamlet-esque suicide, and a grim interior monologue by the villain of the piece.

As challenging as it was, the brilliantly crafted novel is a beach book next to the problematic 1997 adaptation by playwright Erik Ehn, now being performed at Perishable Theatre. Directed by Peter Wallace, it's a brave staging with many flashes of illumination into the dark collective psyche of the Compson family. But burdened by the play's lack of clarity, the production is unable to enthrall.

Under scrutiny in mythical Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, is the disintegration of the once proud House of Compson. The four scenes, each from one character's point of view, take place on Easter Sunday in 1929, two days leading up to it, and a day in 1910 when Quentin (James Barton), a student at Harvard obsessed by his sister, throws himself into the Charles River, pockets weighted by flatirons. Flashbacks to the earlier period occur in other scenes.

The main characters center around Caddy (Kate Lester), whose unhappy promiscuity has various complications. Her brother Ben (Mark Peckham), is as devoted to her as he is profoundly retarded. Everyone thinks he is deaf as well as mute. Big brother Jason (Max Vogler) is Shakespearean in his motiveless malignity, burning two tickets to the circus rather than giving them to the boy servant Luster (Mark Anthony Brown), who is begging for them. Cook and housekeeper Dilsey (Sylvia Ann Soares) is Faulkner's embodiment of endurance. Miss Caroline, the mother of the house, remains an unseen voice at the top of the stairs.

The actors play more than their principal roles, which sometimes enhances the theatricality -- as when a character swoops down to a table and begins talking in a kid's voice -- but too often further disorients us. (This is a play, after all, in which the name Quentin also belongs to a girl, the eventual child of Caddy. The same actress plays mother and daughter.)

Most of the confusion traces to the playwright, though. Well-regarded in experimental theater circles, here Ehn perpetuates the fear that avant-garde means obscure. An example: While attention is drawn to the front yard gate that Ben stares out of, its significance is not revealed. Faulkner made clear that Ben hoped the banished Caddy would some day walk back through it -- and that the reason he was castrated was that he terrified a little girl at the gate, thinking that she was his long-lost sister.

This story, if not this play, certainly has the potential to shake us to our shared and flawed foundation. The Compsons are nothing if not strikingly human. And individual performances here range from good to quite good. But if getting lost on this labyrinthine journey is not to matter to us, we need to maintain a felt sense of what's going on; we need that thread to follow. Ehn's tried to use Caddy for the continuity, to have this wanton and capricious child be the prism that each other character shines their light through. It's not enough to pull this sprawling tale together.

Perhaps no production could have succeeded. But if only each of the performers could have packed the quiet power of Peckham's Ben. The 33-year-old child is a spastic, lumbering hulk, his lips forming a silent and semi-permanent yowl as he trails the servant Luster, one hand on his shoulder. Then in a finger snap, Peckham transforms him, reciting Faulkner's flat descriptions of his interior life with simple dignity.

Perhaps if we could glimpse the feral in the ferocity of Vogler's otherwise convincing Jason, one of the most chilling villains in American literature. There is similar potential in the Christian stoicism of servant Dilsey, if only the spirit of her gospel-song fervor could have been tapped for us.

In other words, this is a play where skillful performances are not enough. If what exactly is going on eludes us much of the time, we need to be able to turn off the sound and follow it like a familiar Greek tragedy, where characters' individual urgencies propel them in their self-destructive directions.

As a novel, The Sound and the Fury is oceanic in its ambitions. As a play, in Ehn's unnecessarily convoluted adaptation, it is a great, tumultuous splash in the water. Full of sound and fury but signifying mostly the profound, beckoning depths left unsounded.