Elevator Repair Service at the New York Public Library

Myriad cool things happen every day in New York, but this weekend's prize for the coolest undoubtedly goes the Elevator Repair Service show at the New York Public Library, going on until six tonight and from one to four p.m. tomorrow. (It's part of the library's centennial celebration.) Known for their innovative productions --- especially their recent series on The Sun Also Rises, The Sound and the Fury, and The Great Gatsby (staged in word-for-word entirety) --- the company takes its interpretation of one of the great periods of American letters one step further with Shuffle. This piece, put together with artist Ben Rubin and UCLA statistician Mark Hansen, transforms the text of those three novels into data streams that get shuffled and generated into a script that is performed by the company in real time. The cast and audience intermingle in the library's periodicals reading room while computers relay lines to iPhones the actors carry in books. Fairly sensible dramatic interactions get interspersed with long streams of nouns, matching subject-verb phrases, and whole sentences, creating a linguistic kaleidoscope any modernist would have been proud of.

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