As his admirers know, economy was not Wallace’s signature style. His footnotes alone can ramble for more than a thousand words at a stretch, and his most famous novel, “Infinite Jest,” all but bore out the adjective of the title. Mr. Fish’s tribute to Wallace certainly honors his affinity for long-haul composition: it runs a daunting two and a half hours without an intermission, which makes both for a long sit (there is a two-minute pause for stretching) and a veritable ocean of words to surf, or occasionally drown in. At times they come at you so fast and frenzied — the selections are transmitted to the performers via headsets, and the pace is determined live by Mr. Fish — that merely staying afloat among Wallace’s often dazzling sentences and swirling digressions becomes a serious challenge.
The small audience, picking its way through those tennis balls littering the floor, takes its seats in one row against a wall of the whitewashed space, as a ball machine fires volleys against the wall opposite, taking aim, it appears, at what I later guessed to be a photo of the back of the young Tracy Austin’s head affixed to the wall.
Wallace’s hilarious excoriation of Ms. Austin’s “breathtakingly insipid” autobiography, delivered in an adrenaline rush by John Amir, the lone male performer, is among the evening’s most engaging passages. Wallace played competitive tennis in his youth and possessed an intricate knowledge of the game and an endless curiosity about the psychology of its greatest practitioners. “It remains very hard for me to reconcile the vapidity of Austin’s narrative mind, on the one hand,” Mr. Amir says, “with the extraordinary mental powers required by world-class tennis, on the other.”
Wallace’s writing, particularly in the journalistic essays from which most of the show is drawn, has a supercharged intensity that can ricochet from high to low in the course of a paragraph. But it has a clarity and momentum that make it a surprisingly good fit for presentation in a theatrical environment. What’s less appealing is the distance between performer and audience that the live delivery of the text, via those chunky headphones, inevitably creates.
You sometimes feel the performers are only half present, more attuned to staying ahead of the streaming rush of words in their ears, and in turn pouring them forth to the audience, than in shaping them into comprehensible rhythms. In one passage Therese Plaehn recites a segment from an essay describing the life of a bathroom attendant — Wallace is both empathetic and repulsed, and his descriptive powers reach a pitch of almost nauseating evocativeness — while performing jumping jacks. It’s a metaphor, I suppose, for the monotonous grind of the job. But mostly the performers — Efthalia Papacosta, Mary Rasmussen and Jenny Seastone Stern are the others — remain seated or standing, their mobility somewhat limited by the cords attaching their headphones to the apparatus streaming the text to them.
Of course Wallace himself is here but not here too — present in the vivid intoxication produced by his words, but existentially absent. His suicide in 2008, at the terribly young age of 46, is surely present in the minds of most in the audience. It is eerily evoked — presaged perhaps — during an otherwise very funny segment culled from an interview with Charlie Rose.
Mr. Rose (whose voice we don’t hear) apparently spends a bizarrely long amount of time inviting Wallace to expatiate on the merits of that year’s Oscar-bait movies like “The English Patient” and “Shine.” But later Wallace speaks of the anxiety of the writing life — one hour of writing, and eight of worrying about not writing — and avers that while he isn’t exactly a dab hand at finding reasons for “getting out of bed in the morning,” nor is he “ready to jump off a building.”
Fortunately that is about as close as the show comes to either sentimentalizing or eulogizing Wallace. Mostly Mr. Fish and his fiercely committed performers are dedicating their energies to animating his brilliant, funny, self-conscious writer’s voice, whether through his recounting of his post-Sept. 11 experience in Bloomington, Ill. (his is the only house that doesn’t suddenly sprout a flag), or obsessing about how a maid on a luxury cruise he takes manages to clean his room so unobtrusively (drawn from the essay that gives the show its title, this is actually one of the weaker passages), or describing, in hauntingly beautiful prose, his passage into adulthood on his 13th birthday.
Still the last episode goes on for far too long in this context. In the Charlie Rose interview Wallace draws the distinction between a painting, which can be absorbed whole almost instantly, and a book, which requires a commitment of time to absorb. Listening to his words spoken aloud in a theatrical setting is both rewarding and exhausting; his virtuosity is both invigorating and a little stunning, in the sense of leaving you dazed and disoriented.
But then among Wallace’s achievements was the creation of a voice so distinctive and idiosyncratic that absorbing it gives you both a rush and a little bit of a hangover too. His most memorable writing made you acutely aware of the thrill of consciousness, but equally alive to the constant burden of it.
A (radically condensed and expanded)
SUPPOSEDLY FUN THING I’LL NEVER DO AGAIN (after David Foster Wallace)
Directed by Daniel Fish; stage manager, Sam Stonefield; sets by Laura Jellinek; lighting by Thomas Dunn; costumes by Andrea Lauer; sound by Daniel Kluger. Presented by the Chocolate Factory, Sheila Lewandowski, executive director; Brian Rogers, artistic director. At the Chocolate Factory, 5-49 49th Avenue, Long Island City, Queens; (212) 352-3101; chocolatefactorytheater.org. Through April 7. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes.
WITH: John Amir, Efthalia Papacosta, Therese Plaehn, Mary Rasmussen and Jenny Seastone Stern.
