Fitz Of Passion

by John Beer

About 30 years ago, Andy Kaufman announced to a Saturday Night Live audience his intention to read aloud “the greatest American novel ever written,” F. Scott Fitzgerald’s ‘The Great Gatsby’. Kaufman’s faux-British accent didn’t exactly help stem the tide of catcalls from the audience. He abandoned the effort after the third page.

Meanwhile in London, David Edgar’s adaptation of Charles Dickens’s ‘Nicholas Nickleby’ neared production. Staged by Trevor Nunn and the Royal Shakespeare Company, ‘Nickleby’ featured 49 speaking roles and an eight-hour running time. Critically and commercially an enormous hit, the production rebuked the shrinking scale of contemporary commercial theater.

Around the same time, Elizabeth LeCompte and Spalding Gray were wrapping up their Rhode Island trilogy, a series in which LeCompte treated Gray’s personal reminiscences as found material. Originally affiliated with Richard Schechner’s Performance Group, LeCompte, Gray and their collaborators viewed the trilogy as a founding production of their new endeavor: the Wooster Group, probably the most celebrated (if controversially so) American avant-garde performance company working today.

Each of these disparate events offers a compass point for approaching Elevator Repair Service’s monumental ‘Gatz’. ERS, formed in 1991 and based in New York, has longstanding ties to the Wooster Group: Director John Collins has worked as a sound designer for the Group, and performer Scott Shepherd played Hamlet in its 2007 production. Aesthetically, ERS has assimilated and extended the Wooster Group’s defamiliarizing approach to classic literary and theatrical texts, as well as its blend of humor, pathos and all-out bizarrerie.

Like ‘Nickleby’, ‘Gatz’ operates on an epic scale, clocking in at six and a half hours. (The MCA will present it in one sitting, with two intermissions and a dinner break.) And like Andy Kaufman, ERS sets out to present every word of Fitzgerald’s novel of self-creation and self-deception — but unlike Kaufman, the company really does it. Rather than catcalls, the group has enjoyed rapturous accolades for its European (and a handful of American) performances of ‘Gatz’ over the last four years. Critics for publications ranging from The Irish Times to the Neue Zurcher Zeitung have raved about it, while a recent performance in Philadelphia received three standing ovations.

Part of the secret of ‘Gatz’s’ success is an ingenious conceit. The piece begins in an office, where a bored worker (Shepherd) furtively reads Gatsby. Slowly it morphs into a staging of incidents from the novel without ever fully abandoning the office setting. Desk chairs become roadsters, and coworkers transform into Jay Gatsby, Daisy Buchanan and the other denizens of West Egg, while Fitzgerald’s words function as a constant through line.

The framing device originated in a happy accident. Following an initial puppet adaptation of some scenes from the novel, in which a thermos topped with stick-on eyes played the book’s narrator (“a perfect Nick,” Shepherd observes), the company decided to embark on a larger-scale Gatsby project. “The question was, ‘What if we don’t cut anything? What if we do everything?'”Collins recalls. Initial work on the piece took place in a spare office at New York’s Performing Garage, a space promoting adventurous performance and theater. ERS found the office space oddly conducive to work on the novel, and it’s stuck with the setting ever since.

A 2003 performance of this proto-‘Gatz’ at Collapsable Hole in Brooklyn, which the MCA’s director of performance Peter Taub attended, demonstrated that a full-scale staging was possible. The performance also set off a chain of events that made ‘Gatz’ something of an avant-garde legend. “It was in October or November of 2004,” Collins says, “that we entered this weird twilight zone.” That was when the company’s relations with the Fitzgerald estate took a turn for the worse.

While discussions with the estate had made clear that a Los Angeles production team was developing its own adaptation, the unusual nature of the ‘Gatz’ project and generally positive signals from the estate had reassured ERS. But three days before ‘Gatz’s’ scheduled New York opening, Collins received a call from the other show’s producer, who expressed plans to open the more traditional Gatsby in New York the following spring and saw ‘Gatz’ as a direct rival. Collins sums it up: “We were fucked at that point.”

Subsequent negotiations with the estate yielded an agreement that dictated ‘Gatz’s’ errant trajectory over the following years. Europe: okay. Minneapolis: okay. Philadelphia: okay. But productions in Boston, Los Angeles, New York or, for that matter, Durham, North Carolina, were ruled out. New York and Durham’s loss is Chicago’s gain, however. Since Taub was an early supporter of the piece, ERS insisted on reserving the possibility of a Chicago performance.

Taub’s enthusiasm for ‘Gatz’ remains palpable today as he describes the unusual effect of the piece’s length: “Because it’s a durational performance, you start to live it a little bit. It creates an emotional and physical memory for the audience.” Also, he says, “it’s a really cool book.”

View the original article on the TimeOut Chicago website here .