Feared and revered by high school students and English majors, William Faulkner is easily one of the most brilliant -- and one of the most challenging -- Titans of American literature. It's no surprise then, to find out that he was on the radar of Elevator Repair Service, a theater troupe with a reputation not only for boundary pushing and post-modern experimentation, but also for tackling literary texts in their entirety, such as 2005's eight hour adaptation of The Great Gatsby, Gatz, in which the entire novel was read word for word. Like Faulkner, Elevator Repair Service is known for boldness and genius, as well as works that can be perplexing and at times, overwhelming. These two entities, Faulkner and ERS, come together with a bang in The Sound and The Fury, onstage now at the Public Theater.

To enter and interpret the work, ERS focused on the first section of the four part novel, April Seventh, 1928, keeping the text completely intact for their two hour performance. This first section is told by Benjy Compson, the severely mentally retarded youngest son of the Compson household, a decaying southern dynasty. Though the text of the play is entirely Faulkner's, unspoken clues help to guide the audience, and the show opens with the entire twelve member cast on stage, as Faulkner's descriptions of the family and the family's black servants are projected in an electric blue along the top of the set. Textually, the piece opens in 1928, when Benjy is 33, years after he was castrated for chasing after school girls in the hopes they were his sister, years after his sister Cady married and left town, years after one of his two older brothers, Quentin, committed suicide.

Though it begins there, the text, and subsequently the play, jumps between shifting and swirling fragments of Benjy's memory, with years and decades clashing against one another, often manifesting in his head as the same moment of collapsed time. Benjy's memories roam from a day in 1898, when he was just a young boy, to Cady as a young woman coming into her sexuality, to the present, in 1928, when his remaining family sends him away to a institution.

With a perplexingly delightful balance between somber, at times heartbreaking moments and over the top, melodramatic characterization, the cast embodies the impressionistic nature of Benjamin Compson's universe that is at once frightening and humorous, completely false and yet deeply connected and true. The set, which resembles a life size, overstuffed antique dollhouse, becomes the stage for decades and characters to exist in the same moment in time in a visually and emotionally overwhelming amalgam of stagecraft. Bizarre moments of dance, slapstick physicality, and cartoonish sound effects highlight the grotesque quality of southern gothic and the over the top quality of Faulkner's characters, and add a much needed levity to the claustrophobic nature of living in the mind of someone who is deaf and dumb.

With the exception of Susie Sokol, who roots the performance with her quietly, captivatingly embodied portrayal of Benjy, each of the cast members inhabits the roles of several characters throughout the years and generations as Benjy recalls them, swapping fluidly amongst age, gender, and race. Vin Knight exemplified the way the show was able to work, because though he switched from young Jason, one of Benjy's brothers, to Versh, a servant, to Dilsey, Versh's mother and the family's "mammy," to many other roles throughout, without much costuming to provide visual clues, his complete physical and tonal engagement with each character, be it a young white boy or an elderly black woman, made following these lightning fast shifts possible. Mike Iveson, a veteran of the Elevator Repair Service, and Daphne Gaines were also astounding in their chameleon like ability to inhabit diverse roles with ease, though the entire cast was equally notable, and as an ensemble they tell the story with fierceness and love.

The Sound and The Fury is a bulwark of American literature, because as long as people interact with it, it will continue to unfold and reveal new channels of insight and beauty. The Elevator Repair Service has breathed life into the work, proving that the things that challenge us are often the most rewarding. As only a truly inspired adaptation can, ERS has developed a truly unique, brilliant spectacle of its own.