If you've never read William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, you probably won't get much out of Elevator Repair Service's The Sound and the Fury (April Seventh, 1928), now at New York Theatre Workshop. Even if you have read the novel, you may still be hard pressed to appreciate the experimental troupe's perplexing and only occasionally dynamic treatment of the text.

Faulkner's masterpiece chronicles the decline of the Compson family from four different perspectives. ERS utilizes just the first section, told from the viewpoint of the book's man-child "idiot," Benjy. This segment is confusing enough, as Benjy has no sense of time, so one incident reminds him of another and then another, w[...]