Founded in 1991 by John Collins and a small group of actors, Elevator Repair Service Theater has dedicated itself to staging all manner of texts, including and especially those that were never meant for the stage. Of all of those odd sources, literature emerged as a favorite starting point in the early 2000s and has since become a calling card. In 2004, ERS embarked on a multi-year project to stage the entire text of The Great Gatsby. That eight-hour production, Gatz, which went on to be presented in over a dozen countries around the world, would redefine the company and introduce it to a vastly expanded audience. The production was honored with numerous awards and ran for a total of eighteen weeks at The Public Theater. In the ensuing years, ERS developed other performances of verbatim text from early twentieth-century novels. The Sound and the Fury (2008) presented...

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