The Playwrights Database
ELEVATOR REPAIR SERVICE (1991 - )
Nationality: USAemail: Click here to contact Website: Click here
Literary Agent: n/a
Elevator Repair Service, a theater ensemble, was founded by director John Collins and a group of actors in 1991. Since that time, ERS has built a body of work that has earned it a loyal following and made it one of New York's most highly-acclaimed experimental theater companies of the past 20 years. The group's theater pieces are built around a broad range of subject matter and literary forms. They combine elements of slapstick comedy, hi-tech and lo-tech design, both literary and found text, found objects and discarded furniture, and the group's own highly developed style of choreography. ERS creates its performances through extended periods of collaboration. Sources for the group's work include novels, non-fiction writings, films, plays, television programs, and various other mediA. Each ERS piece is developed over the course of a season through several work-in-progress showings to small audiences and culminates in an extended run in New York. ERS' first show was presented in December 1991 and since 1997, its work has toured the United States and Europe. ERS has been seen all over downtown New York and has cultivated a loyal - and growing - following. The company has performed at Performance Space 122, The Performing Garage, HERE, The Ontological at St. Mark's Church, The Flea, The Kitchen, Soho Rep and New York Theatre Workshop. abroad, ERS performances have been presented in Holland, Belgium, Slovenia, austria, Norway, Germany, France, Portugal and Switzerland; and, in the United States, the ensemble has been presented in Philadelphia, Chicago, Hanover (NH), Troy (NY), Columbus, Seattle, Minneapolis, Houston, Burlington, Washington D.C., Sarasota (FL) and Portland (OR). In 2009, ERS was awarded the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Theater Grant, as well as the Theatre Communications Group's Peter Zeisler Memorial award for Outstanding achievement. The company has steadily built a diverse audience since its inception and has earned near-universal praise from the press along the way. ERS' best-known piece is 2005's Gatz, which will continue to tour the world through 2010. This marathon presentation of the entire text of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby has been called "thrillingly theatrical and moving" by The New York Times and "a revelatory and exuberant experience" by Variety, and was nominated for Australia's prestigious Helpmann award for Best Play during its 2009 run at the Sydney Opera House.Gatz, which is still awaiting permission from the Fitzgerald estate to be performed in New York, has propelled ERS to a new level of visibility and acclaim. The follow-up to Gatz, The Sound and The Fury (April Seventh, 1928), premiered in 2008 at New York Theatre Workshop. a daring presentation of "the Benjy chapter" of Faulkner's notorious novel, The Sound and The Fury played to sold-out houses in an extended run in New York. Ben Brantley of The New York Times called it "a magical opportunity" and Hilton als of The New Yorker called it "a great work . . . suffused with an innocence one rarely glimpses in a contemporary work of art." The Sound and The Fury (April Seventh, 1928) was nominated for 2009 Lucille awards for Outstanding Play and Outstanding Sound Design (Matt Tierney), and has an extensive touring itinerary through 2010.
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below is a list of Elevator Repair Service's plays - click on a Play Title for more information
Arguendo Cab Legs Fondly, Collette Richland Gatz Highway To Tomorrow Language Instruction: Love Family Vs Andy Kaufman Marx Brothers On Horseback Salad McGurk: A Cautionary Tale Mr. Antipyrene, Fire Extinguisher No Great Society Room Tone Shuffle Shut Up I Tell You (I Said Shut Up I Tell You) Sound And The Fury, The (April Seventh, 1928) Spine Check Sun Also Rises, The (The Select) Total Fictional LieArguendo
Synopsis:
Barnes v. Glen Theatre, argued before The Court in 1991, is a case brought by a group of go-go dancers who claimed a First Amendment right to dance totally nude, despite an Indiana law that said they couldn't. In oral argument, the justices debate the definition of dance, nudity in opera houses vs. strip-clubs and whether naked erotic dancing is artistic expression or a crime. Arguendo is a verbatim staging of both the transcript of this case's oral argument and an interview with an erotic dancer who came to listen. The production design features a swirl of animated text projections by video artist Ben Rubin and a re-imagined Supreme Court on rolling chairs. The drama that emerges is in turns absurd, hilarious, provocative and intellectually compelling.
Notes:
Arguendo began its life at The Guiding Lights Weekend in Seattle in March 2012. The piece was further developed in part through rehearsals at New York Theatre Workshop and Abrons Art Center, and with work-in-progress showings at The Bushwick Starr in May 2012, the Philadelphia Live Arts Festival in September 2012, and The Public Theaters Under the Radar Festival in January 2013
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Male: 2 Female: 2 Other: -
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Top of PageCab Legs
Synopsis:
One of ERS' most popular pieces, Cab Legs infuses a classic love story with frantic choreography from Indian movie musicals and Betty Boop cartoons. Blending raucous 50s Colombian dance music and several very creaky antique chairs into its boisterous audio score, the show seduces audiences with a hushed intensity. In 1997, Cab Legs marked a departure for ERS. For Cab Legs (the title being the group's name for a dance move it copped from a 1930s Cab Calloway routine), the company reconceived its comedic stylings from a new emotional center. The show combines ERS' characteristically broad physical comedy with subtler, quieter passages that are both funny and poignant. Formally, Cab Legs is a reimagination of what sorts of actions, sounds and sets can constitute theater. In this piece, ERS radically extends its sound stage, with much of the show's action coming through sound from distant parts of the building. another of Cab Legs'innovations: the company's actors paraphrase almost all their lines from night to night, setting each performance in a zone somewhere between improvisation and traditionally rehearsed recitation. Each performance of the piece maintains a fresh edge without sacrificing structure or direction.
ERS Website
ERS Website
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1st Produced:
The Performing Garage (as "Catastrophe!") 1996
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Male: 6 Female: 2 Other: -
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Top of PageFondly, Collette Richland
Synopsis:
As a serene domestic scene gradually unravels, mysterious off-stage forces and an unexpected guest become entwined in a drama that is a surreal homage to Jane Bowles and a cadre of other influences. ERS signature physical performance meets Kempsons inimitable style with a live score played by longtime ERS member and Kempson collaborator Mike Iveson. The result is a lush, engaging, strange and beautiful trip into unknown mental and physical spaces.
Notes:
In their first ever collaboration with a contemporary writer, Elevator Repair Service joins forces with playwright Sibyl Kempson to create Fondly, Collette Richland
1st Produced:
preview performance: Walker Art Center, Minneapolis 16 May 2013
Organisations:
Elevator Repair Service
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Male: - Female: - Other: -
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Top of PageGatz
Synopsis:
James Gatz - that was really, or at least legally, his name. 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. 6 hours long and with a cast of 13, Gatz is by far ERS's most ambitious endeavor yet - not a retelling of the Gatsby story but an enactment of the novel itself. Fitzgerald's American masterpiece is delivered word for word, startlingly brought to life by a low-rent office staff in the midst of their inscrutable business operations.
ERS Website
ERS Website
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1st Produced:
KunstenFESTIVaLdesarts, Brussels May 2006
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Male: 8 Female: 5 Other: -
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Top of PageHighway To Tomorrow
Synopsis:
This tragicomic reinterpretation of Euripides' The Bacchae combines crummy found-object puppets, mid-century afropop, innumerable soy sauce packets and the group's uniquely fractured choreography. Thriving in the space between funny, moving, and strange, Highway To Tomorrow is genuinely original theater.
ERS Website
ERS Website
Notes:
Original Playwright - Euripides
1st Produced:
HERE Arts Center
145 6th avenue, New York, NY 10013 1999
145 6th avenue, New York, NY 10013 1999
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Male: 4 Female: 1 Other: -
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Top of PageLanguage Instruction: Love Family Vs Andy Kaufman
Synopsis:
Language Instruction profiles the late comedian andy Kaufman in a suitably Kaufmanesque fashion. Elevator Repair Service often inhabits a universe where the ghost of andy Kaufman - whose strange and remarkable career ranged from stand-up clubs to Taxi to the professional wrestling ring - would feel right at home. Language Instruction unwinds as a dynamic semi-narrative that puts a seemingly hapless Kaufman on stage with a team of bizarro-Berlitz instructors, whose mission, for some reason, is to teach badly fractured Dutch, German, Japanese and pure nonsense to whomever will listen.
ERS Website
ERS Website
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1st Produced:
P.S. 122
150 1st avenue, New York, NY 10003 1993
150 1st avenue, New York, NY 10003 1993
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Male: 4 Female: 2 Other: -
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Top of PageMarx Brothers On Horseback Salad
Synopsis:
In 1937, Salvador Dali, a fan of The Marx Brothers, wrote for them a screenplay entitled "Giraffes on Horseback Salad." The screenplay, long since lost, never made it to production, but the idea of it did find its way to newly-formed ERS. Then in its first year as an ensemble, the company researched the lost script and watched every Marx Brothers film they could find. Marx Brothers on Horseback Salad is the result of ERS' attempt to reconstruct the screenplay and imagine the relationship between Dali and the famous veterans of vaudeville and screen. The piece featured a multi-armed Groucho, a harp strung with barbed wire and a strange silent trio of "the greatest aviators in the world." In between recreating images and scenes from Dali's script, ERS staged its imaginings of awkward domestic encounters between Harpo and his wife and Dali and his glamorous muse, Gala.
ERS Website
ERS Website
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1st Produced:
The American Living Room, Ohio Theater 1992
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Genre:
Piece
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Male: 9 Female: 4 Other: -
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Top of PageMcGurk: A Cautionary Tale
Synopsis:
RS' ode to Mission Impossible and turn of the century New York City, McGurk unfolds in The Bowery's legendary saloon, "McGurk's Suicide Hall." In a ploy to expose a corrupt politician from the past, a crack team of imposters recreate the infamous bar where prostitutes and other low life came to poison themselves. Gambling, carribean-style demon-possession, burlesque performances by a mason jar and, finally, a fixed election ensue before the clueless mark, alexander Washington Plinkett, is undone.
ERS Website
ERS Website
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1st Produced:
Ontological-at-St-Mark's Theater, NY 1993
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Genre:
Piece
Parts:
Male: 6 Female: 2 Other: -
Further Reference:
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Top of PageMr. Antipyrene, Fire Extinguisher
Synopsis:
based on a dada play by Tristan Tzara. Tristan Tzara was a dada thinker who was active just after World War One.
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1st Produced:
NYC 1991
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Male: 2 Female: 2 Other: -
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Top of PageNo Great Society
Synopsis:
Beat legend turned virulent conservative Jack Kerouac comes back to life in the unlikely form of Susie Sokol, guest-appearing on The Steve allen Show as a shy poet prone to sudden outbursts of lyric mania, wreaking cantankerous drunken disorder on a panel discussion about hippies led by William F. Buckley Jr, and now and then spinning out into irrepressible fits of mad dancing and delirious poetry.
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1st Produced:
P.S. 122
150 1st avenue, New York, NY 10003 2006
150 1st avenue, New York, NY 10003 2006
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Male: 3 Female: 1 Other: -
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Top of PageRoom Tone
Synopsis:
a haunting, humorous, yet sincere meditation on spiritual belief, Room Tone draws on touchstone texts by the eminent turn-of-the-century Harvard psychologist William James, and his brother, the novelist Henry James. While William's approach to the ineffable was scientific, Henry explored the same topic through fiction. Each in his own way, these fathers of modern American philosophy and literature, grappled with how and why religious and spiritual beliefs form - a question that still very much haunts the world today. With Room Tone, ERS reconceives William's landmark Varieties of Religious Experience as theatrical monologues and Henry's great novella The Turn of the Screw as a disorienting vision. With strangely intimate performances, intricate choreography set to powerfully resonant Balinese gamelan music, sound and lighting design that are both simple and sophisticated, a penchant for slapstick, and innovative staging that takes nothing for granted, we've created a piece that hovers between hallucination and sight, public performance and private reverie. The result is a tragicomic ghost story - our darkest work yet, literally and otherwise.
ERS Website
ERS Website
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1st Produced:
Ohio Theatre
66 Wooster Street, New York, NY 10012 2001
66 Wooster Street, New York, NY 10012 2001
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If Publisher (above) is underlined then the play may be purchased by direct click from the Publisher, otherwise (below) are AbeBooks for secondhand, signed & 1st eds and other Booksellers for new copies
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Genre:
Piece
Parts:
Male: 2 Female: 3 Other: -
Further Reference:
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Top of PageShuffle
Synopsis:
Shuffle is an entirely new kind of ERS performance, one with constantly re-generated text and a dream-like logic. Through this collaboration with installation artist Ben Rubin and UCLA statistician Mark Hansen, the company looks back on its last three pieces through the lens of creative data analysis. The result is a site-specific mash-up where the company attempts to read The Great Gatsby, The Sound and the Fury and The Sun Also Rises simultaneously. The rearranged and overlapping texts produce compelling visual displays designed by Rubin and surprising, often absurd, micro-theater featuring many veteran ERS performers. Audience is encouraged to wander among the performers as they improvise. With scripts generated in real time by digital algorithms, phrases from the iconic novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway merge to create a look back at some of Americas favorite texts that is at once disorienting and enlightening.
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1st Produced:
New York May 2011
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Male: 5 Female: 5 Other: -
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Top of PageShut Up I Tell You (I Said Shut Up I Tell You)
Synopsis:
Shut Up I Tell You draws on two wildly divergent sources and stirs them together. a collection of obscure radio horror stories which found its way fortuitouslly into the company's hands forms the basis for part one of the piece. a series of stage adaptations of these radio plays, part one is a slapstick romp through a set piled with forgotten furniture, electric garbage cans and old dot-matrix printers that play "cats" and talk back when spoken to. Part Two takes the awkard, amateurish and hilariously twisted style of part one and applies it to a narrative of the company's own making. The plot, laced with details uncovered in the group's research into secret societies, revolves around a hapless architect stumbling on to a masonic sect. The second act resolves itself in a battle to the death between our hero the architect and her very unlikely foe, the Worshipful Master of the local lodge.
ERS Website
ERS Website
Notes:
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1st Produced:
Ontological-at-St-Mark's Theater (as "Boulevard of Broken") 1995
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If Publisher (above) is underlined then the play may be purchased by direct click from the Publisher, otherwise (below) are AbeBooks for secondhand, signed & 1st eds and other Booksellers for new copies
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Genre:
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Parts:
Male: 4 Female: 1 Other: -
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Top of PageSound And The Fury, The (April Seventh, 1928)
Synopsis:
based on part of the novel by the same name by William Faulkner. This information is from the press materials: "The Sound and the Fury tells the story of the decline of the Compson family of fictional Yoknapatawpha county, Mississippi. a once noble clan descended from a Civil War hero, the family falls victim to many of the shortcomings Faulkner believed were the problems of the reconstructed South-racism, greed, selfishnesss-thereby showing how the ideals and life of the old South could not easily be maintained or preserved in the post-Civil War era. "April Seventh, 1928," part one of the novel, is told from the point of view of Benjy Compson, who is mute with the mind of a child. . .Elevator Repair Service's body of work combines elements of slapstick comedy, hi-tech and lo-tech design, vaudeville, both literary and found text, found objects and discarded furniture, and the group's own highly developed style of choreography."
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If Publisher (above) is underlined then the play may be purchased by direct click from the Publisher, otherwise (below) are AbeBooks for secondhand, signed & 1st eds and other Booksellers for new copies
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Genre:
Play/Drama
Parts:
Male: 7 Female: 5 Other: -
Further Reference:
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Top of PageSpine Check
Synopsis:
Spine Check, ERS' take on film noir, features a grizzled 40's detective who carries his office on his back and grumbles climate science and weather philosophy to himself. He is approached by Hedda Vaviche, the attractive widow of the legendary "ice-man" - a pre-historic hunter trapped and permanently preserved in an equally anachronistic ice age. Office in tow, the detective sets off to find the ice-man's killer. Meanwhile, the duplicitous Vaviche and a gang of bumbling criminals kidnap an innocent weather forecaster (and our detective's informant) as part of a plot to squelch the reporting of an imminent ice age. The detective, who narrowly escapes death by time bomb, eventually tracks down the nefarious gang with the help of a lab technician who speaks in the voice of the aging Canadian novelist W.O. Mitchell.
ERS Website
ERS Website
Notes:
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1st Produced:
ERS Lift 1992
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If Publisher (above) is underlined then the play may be purchased by direct click from the Publisher, otherwise (below) are AbeBooks for secondhand, signed & 1st eds and other Booksellers for new copies
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Genre:
Piece
Parts:
Male: 4 Female: 2 Other: -
Further Reference:
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Top of PageSun Also Rises, The (The Select)
Synopsis:
The first world war is over, but some battles still rage on. The Sun also Rises, Ernest Hemingway's first major novel, follows a group of weary, aimless and frequently inebriated American expatriates searching for identity, redemption and diversion in Europe. Told with spare and tightly written prose, Hemingway's story winds its way through France and Spain and lands in Pamplona where bullfighting and the fiesta rage in the streets. In this world premiere staging from acclaimed New York ensemble Elevator Repair Service, Hemingway's novel comes to life on a stage littered with liquor bottles and cafe chairs. Elevator Repair Service's interpretations of classic American novels by F Scott Fitzgerald and William Faulkner have garnered critical acclaim across the world. an illuminating stage interpretation of one of America's greatest literary works, The Sun also Rises(The Select) features the ensemble's trademark sound design, highly energized choreography and re-imagined bullfighting.
Notes:
based on the novel by Ernest Hemingway. Oct 2009 Ringling International Arts Festival (Work in Progress), Sarasota, FL
1st Produced:
Edinburgh: Royal Lyceum, Scotland, EUR >>> 14 Aug 2010
Organisations:
Elevator Repair Service and New York Theatre Workshop
1st Published:
- -
Music:
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Genre:
adaptation
Parts:
Male: 6 Female: 4 Other: doubling
Further Reference:
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Top of PageTotal Fictional Lie
Synopsis:
Inspired by the gestural and verbal haplessness of documentary-film subjects, Total Fictional Lie is a reeling conglomeration of speech and dance that, like a piece of music, makes a formally coherent, intuitive kind of sense. ERS's eighth original piece, TFL is an absurdist and dance-heavy look at sales and marketing. The show's speeches and dialogue are taken verbatim from some famous and not-so-famous documentary films and its choreography developed from the awkwardly presentational body language of the films' camera-shy subjects.
ERS Website
ERS Website
Notes:
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1st Produced:
P.S. 122
150 1st avenue, New York, NY 10003 1998
150 1st avenue, New York, NY 10003 1998
Organisations:
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If Publisher (above) is underlined then the play may be purchased by direct click from the Publisher, otherwise (below) are AbeBooks for secondhand, signed & 1st eds and other Booksellers for new copies
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Genre:
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Parts:
Male: 4 Female: 3 Other: -
Further Reference:
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