Elevator Repair Service Theater Inc

Throughout the 2025 fiscal year, Elevator Repair Service Theater (ERS) fulfilled its mission of creating original works with an ongoing ensemble that explore and challenge the fundamentals of live performance. In the past 12 months, ERS continued development of our new work, Ulysses, internationally performed Baldwin and Buckley at Cambridge, revived our most famous work, Gatz, and engaged in additional ancillary activities to further bolster our cultural and educational partnerships and increase audience engagement.In November of 2024, ERS remounted a sold-out 19-performance run of Gatz, our 8-hour-long word-for-word enactment of The Great Gatsby, at The Public Theater in New York City. Two decades after its original NYC premiere, Gatz still drew interest and acclaim, and we have received renewed touring interest in the production following this engagement. Ulysses is ERSs take on James Joyce's iconic modernist novel. ERS has a successful history of reinvigorating and bringing new perspectives to pieces of classic literature, and our goal in presenting Ulysses is to transform the notoriously inaccessible text into a performance piece that is both accessible and compelling to a broader audience. Following a world premiere at Bards SummerScape festival in June/July 2024 that received a New York Times Critics Pick, ERS continued to develop the work with engagements at FringeArts in Philadelphia, PA, in September 2024, UMS (University of Michigan) in Ann Arbor, MI, in October 2024, and UCLA in Los Angeles, CA, in April 2025. Altogether, ERS had the opportunity to perform Ulysses for more than 2,500 audience members in FY25. Later in April 2025, ERSs original production Baldwin and Buckley at Cambridge toured to the FIND Festival in Berlin, Germany, for four performances. BBAC is a verbatim depiction of a debate between James Baldwin and William F. Buckley, Jr. at Cambridge University. The piece is a new staging of the text of the 1965 debate whose subject - "The American Dream is at the expense of the American Negro" is as relevant today as it was almost 60 years ago.ERS has also recently participated in ancillary activities in collaboration with other artistic and cultural organizations. In March 2025, ERS collaborated with the James Joyce Society on a free public reading of Exiles, the only play written by James Joyce. Additionally, in December 2024, ERS Artistic Director John Collins and longtime ERS company member Scott Shepherd visited students at The New School to discuss ERS and the development of Ulysses. These ancillary activities allow us to reach broader audiences and interact with groups that may not traditionally attend live theater.