Elevator Repair Service

Elevator Repair Service (ERS) are a New York-based theater ensemble founded by director John Collins and a group of actors in 1991.

ERS have performed in various New York including Performance Space 122, The Performing Garage, HERE, The Ontological at St. Mark's Church, The Flea, The Kitchen, and Soho Rep. They have also performed elsewhere in the United States, and in Europe.

In 2008, the ensemble was awarded a grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award.

During its first 15 years, the company worked "with found texts or improvised, anything that wasn't literature" as director John Collins pointed out in an interview. These pieces included Language Instruction (1994), inspired by Andy Kaufman and "How To Speak Dutch" LP's; Cab Legs (1997), referencing Tennessee Williams; and Total Fictional Lie (1998), which drew on documentary films as its source material. On composing these early pieces, former ERS co-director Steve Bodow said, "We like words or movement or sounds that go through a process of several translations. Sometimes it’s literal, from one language to another, sometimes it’s more metaphorical, from one medium to another."

This has changed with the play Gatz, premiered in 2006, the first of a trilogy -although initially not planned as such- of plays based on American novels from the mid to late 1920s. The trilogy consists of the plays Gatz, The Sound and the Fury (April Seventh, 1928) and The Sun Also Rises (The Select). ERS have adapted these three plays in different ways. For the first play, Gatz, based on the novel The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (first published 1925), ERS performed every word of the book in a production that lasted over six hours. The second play is based on The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner (first published 1929), and ERS staged a single chapter. For the third play, based on The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway (first published 1927), ERS created an edited version relying heavily on original dialogues but omitting most of the novel's prose.

Works

• Mr. Anti-Pyrene, Fire Extinguisher
• Marx Brothers on Horseback Salad
• Spine Check
• Language Instruction: Love Family vs. Andy Kaufman
• McGurk: A Cautionary Tale
• Shut Up I Tell You (I Said Shut Up I Tell You)
• Cab Legs
• Total Fictional Lie
• Highway to Tomorrow
• Room Tone
• Gatz
• No Great Society
• The Sound and the Fury (April Seventh, 1928)
• The Sun Also Rises (The Select)*

Shows from source: For show marked *, also refer to source:

External links

• Official site
• ERS on the PBS show "Art Beat," with video and sound clips.
• 1999 BOMB Magazine interview of Elevator Repair Service by Coco Fusco