Ringling International Arts Festival hosts Peter Brook's 'Love Is My Sin'; Aszure & Artists; FSU Symphony Orchestra; Louise Fishman Among the Old Masters

Novels get turned into plays and movies all the time, and when the stories are classics, they usually come out much worse for the wear in the journey from page to stage or screen. Could it get any more ridiculous than Robert Redford and Mia Farrow in The Great Gatsby?

That wasn't exactly the thinking of Elevator Repair Service, a Brooklyn-based avant-garde theater company, but bonehead adaptations like the 1974 movie surely played a part in inspiring its production of Gatz. In a six-hour performance of a highly acclaimed staging of F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel, the company reads the entire novel, every single word, not even cutting a "he said'' or "she said.''

"The idea almost cropped up not so much as a plan but as a kind of crazy challenge we threw down to ourselves,'' says artistic director John Collins. "There was something about that novel where it really felt like this perfectly put together puzzle, and as soon as you started taking anything out, it just felt wrong. It was hard to find a place to draw the line. So we decided that we would make a rule to just do everything.''

Despite its marathon length, Gatz has been a hit around the world, most recently playing three weeks in the Sydney Opera House in Australia. The company has gone on to stage works by two other iconic American novelists from Fitzgerald's generation, with productions of William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury and Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises.

The Sun Also Rises, in a workshop performance, promises to be one of the highlights of this week's Ringling International Arts Festival, an impressive array of cutting-edge theater, dance and music. The festival is a collaboration between Sarasota's Ringling Museum of Art and New York's Baryshnikov Arts Center, founded and presided over by ballet great Mikhail Baryshnikov and devoted to cultivating emerging and mid-career artists.

Elevator Repair Service was founded by Collins and a group of actors in 1991, and it soon became a key player in New York's experimental theater scene. Now the company's inventive treatment of great American novels has given it a wider audience.

"We sort of stumbled into The Great Gatsby and discovered what we liked about it as we were doing it,'' Collins says. "But with these next two, we wanted to choose a thread that we could follow through in that particular period of American literature.''

Collins, 39, first came across the books of Fitzgerald, Faulkner and Hemingway while growing up in Vidalia, Ga. "These are novels that we're all given to read in high school, but I think that's a time when we're too young to appreciate the subtlety and lyricism of their modernism,'' he says. "I think people are startled by the simple beauty of the language.''

After their success with Gatz, Collins and company took a different approach to The Sound and the Fury, limiting the production to the novel's surrealistic first chapter ("There were some really intense challenges with the Faulkner,'' he says) in a performance of about 2 1/2 hours. The Sarasota production of The Sun Also Rises is a work in progress and will cover just the first seven chapters of the novel and run about 50 minutes.

"What really excited me about The Sun Also Rises was Hemingway's ear for dialogue,'' Collins says. "We're treating the narration and the dialogue a little bit separately this time. In a way, it feels the most like a play of the three pieces. It reminds me of The Great Gatsby in a lot of ways. They both have a kind of coolness to the dialogue and the perspective of the narrator.''

The Sun Also Rises, published in 1926, was Hemingway's breakthrough book, chronicling the "lost generation'' of Americans in Paris after World War I. Jake Barnes, the narrator, is a newspaper correspondent who suffered an unspecified injury in the war that keeps him from making love to the glamorous Lady Brett Ashley.

"Jake's injury is very mysterious,'' Collins says. "It becomes almost poetic in the way that it symbolizes his inability to have Brett. The problem between the two of them is something deeper and more complicated than just that she can't be with him because of his injury. Jake is battling emotional demons he can't quite get rid of. There's something about the complexity of Jake's problem that makes it feel truthful.''

Jake, Brett and their crowd drink prodigiously as they make their way from the bars and cafes of Paris to the running of the bulls in the streets of Pamplona, Spain. The Elevator Repair Service performance has a cast of nine and is "set in a kind of ghostly cafe space that Jake's character can't really escape,'' Collins says. "It's littered with bottles and people drift in and out. I wanted the set to feel like it was all sort of existing in this haze, some kind of dream about being drunk and passed out.''

• • •

There's more literature onstage in the festival's biggest coup, the U.S. premiere of Love Is My Sin, the sonnets of Shakespeare adapted by Peter Brook and performed by his wife, Natasha Parry, and Michael Pennington. Franck Krawczyk plays music of Couperin on keyboard and accordion.

Love Is My Sin draws on 29 sonnets chosen by Brook, the English director who wrote one of theater's holy texts, The Empty Space. His Lord of the Flies (1963) is a film landmark, and his stagings of Shakespeare are legendary. Since 1974 he has been based in Paris and turned out a string of influential productions that include La Tragedie de Carmen, The Mahabharata and Tierno Bokar.

"Apart from his masterpieces, Shakespeare also wrote uncommonly beautiful sonnets,'' Brook writes. "To choose between 154 sonnets, I needed to find a dramatic continuity and was guided by the hidden tensions that arise in a relationship between two people.

“Love Is My Sin allows us to penetrate into Shakespeare's own, most secret life. It is his private diary, in which we find his intimate questions, his jealousy, his passions, his guilt, his despair. Above all, he searches to discover for himself the deep meaning of being attracted by a man or by a woman, even by the act of writing itself.

"This is neither a play nor a poetry recital. It catches the actors in true human relationships. Then, at the very end, they become speakers for Shakespeare himself who wrote prophetically that his verse is stronger than time and will last forever."

John Fleming can be reached at fleming@sptimes.com or (727) 893-8716. He blogs on Critics Circle at blogs.tampabay.com/arts.