Putting ‘The Great Gatsby’ – Every Word Of It – Onstage

by Rebecca Mead

A gaunt, fair-haired man, about forty, enters a deserted, dilapidated office. It’s morning: twenty minutes before ten, according to a clock atop a bulky computer monitor, which, like other furnishings in the office—a black leather couch, a metal desk, a black Rolodex—seems to date from the mid-eighties. He hands his raincoat on a hat stand and sits down on the ripped leather seat of a swivel chair, placing next to him a paper coffee cup from a Greek diner. He’s wearing a blue shirt, a tie, dark pants, shiny brown wing tips: the uniform of the mid-level functionary. He reaches under the desk to fiddle with the computer’s suitcase-size hard drive, taps a key repeatedly, peers at the screen. He reaches under the desk again, presses the hard drive’s power button, and counts to ten, mouthing the numbers to himself, then presses it again. He peers at the lifeless screen, then sits back in his chair, nonplussed. Finally, he opens the Rolodex; hidden inside is a paperback copy of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby.” He picks it up and starts reading aloud: “In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.” His delivery is tentative—within the first couple of pages he stumbles over the pronunciation of “the Duke of Buccleuch”—and his eyes scan the lines studiously, as if he’d somehow skipped the novel when it was assigned in high school, and is unsure where the book will take him.

 

So begins “Gatz,” which debuts at the Public Theatre later this month. It would be misleading to call “Gatz”-the signature work of Elevator Repair Service, an experimental theater company based in New York-an adaptation of “The Great Gatsby,” since nothing in the novel has be altered to conform to theatrical constraints. Nor is it precisely a theatricalization of the novel: there are no bobbed hairdos, cigarette holders, or flapper gowns. Rather, in “Gatz”-which is the original surname of Jay Gatsby-the text of “The Great Gatsby” is spoken aloud, all forty-nine thousand words of it, and the action unfolds solely within the shabby office space. Gradually, other workers appear. As the narrator reads the novel’s fourth paragraph-“Conduct may be founded on the hard rock of the wet marshes, but after a certain point I don’t care what it’s founded on”-his superior arrives and sits, stony-faced, at the typewriter at the opposite end of the desk; he is apparently unfazed that his employee is reading literature aloud on the job. A vaguely menacing janitor, with keys jangling at his waist, comes onstage to sort mail as the narrator describes Tom Buchanan, “one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty-one that everything afterwards savors of anti-climax.” A sporty-looking young woman, in exercise pants and tennis shoes, lounges on the leather couch, reading a golfing magazine, as Jordan Baker is introduced into the narrative: “her chin raised a little, as if she were balancing something on it which was quite likely to fall.”

 

For the first half hour, the narrator impersonates the other characters in the book-he delivers Daisy Buchanan’s greeting to Nick Carraway, “I’m p-paralyzed with happiness,” in a squeaky attempt at girlishness, and speaks Tom Buchanan’s lines with gruff animation, appearing to enjoy himself. But eventually the other workers begin speaking the dialogue: “Civilization’s going to pieces,” the janitor breaks in. The remaining text, including every “he said” and “she said,” is supplied by the man with the fair hair, who both is and isn’t Nick Carraway. The show lasts for a Wagnerian eight hours, including two short intermissions and a dinner break.

 

The theatrical effect of “Gatz,” at least at first, is like that of ventriloquism; it’s as if Fitzgerald were being channeled by the characters from “The Office.” When the narrator, who is played by Scott Shepherd, reads Carraway’s description of Gatsby-“He was a son of God, a phrase which, if it means anything, means just that”-he pauses questioningly, even a bit stupidly, as a character in a Judd Apatow movie might. But what could have been a tiresome gimmick achieves, in the course of the show, a kind of sublimity. Audience members are engaged by a vivid theatrical reality-the obscure parallel drama unfolding among the office workers-but are also obliged to conjure the world “Gatsby.” When Shepherd reads the description, toward the beginning of Chapter 3, of Gatsby’s lavish party-“A celebrated tenor had sung in Italian, and a notorious contralto had sung in jazz, and between the numbers people were doing stunts all over the garden, while happy, vacuous bursts of laughter rose toward the summer sky”-the scene is portrayed by the young woman in tennis shoes, who enacts each outlandish activity solo, as if playing charades. The party scene in Chapter 2, in the New York apartment rented by Tom Buchanan for the purpose of entertaining his mistress, Myrtle Wilson, becomes a sordid office gathering, with sheaves of documents scattered over the floor, drunken assistants disporting themselves inappropriately, loud music playing, and Shepherd valiantly clinging to his paperback amid the chaos.

 

At the same time, “Gatz” immerses the audience in the beauty of Fitzgerald’s incantatory prose (which Shepherd has learned so well that, given any three consecutive words from the text, he can pick up and continue indefinitely). In the show’s final minutes, Shepherd, sitting in the swivel chair, delivers Carraway’s recollections of riding a steam train west from Chicago as a boy: “When we pulled out into the winter night and the real snow, our snow, began to stretch out beside us and twinkle against the windows, and the dim lights of small Wisconsin stations moved by, a sharp wild brace came suddenly into the air. We drew in deep breaths of it as we walked back from dinner through the cold vestibules, unutterably aware of our identity with this country for one strange hour, before we melted indistinguishably into it again.” The audience, arriving at the end of its own eight-hour journey, has been uniquely primed to feel the force of Fitzgerald’s image. Oskar Eustis, the artistic director of the Public, says that after he saw “Gatz” for the first time he “had the experience of spending a few minutes once it was over floating on the surprising sensation that “The Great Gatsby” is the greatest novel ever written. It’s not true, but the fact that this show could convince me of that spoke volumes about how it worked.” Rather that dramatizing “The Great Gatsby,” “Gatz” dramatizes the experience of reading “The Great Gatsby,” and in doing so it delivers the book-curiously and circuitously-back to its author.

 

A few months after “The Great Gatsby” was published, in April, 1925, Fitzgerald, who was living in France, had dinner with James Rennie, then a movie actor of moderate renown. Rennie, who was married to the actress Dorothy Gish, had recently signed on to play the role of Gatsby in a Broadway adaptation. The playwright was Owen Davis, a prolific author of crowd-pleasing melodramas: a 1911 essay in The American Magazine called him a “chain-writer,” reporting that “he’d write FINIS to one play and, without re-sharpening his pencil, begin with the title of the next.” By 1925, David had become Broadway’s “king of professional play doctors,” as Fitzgerald put it in a letter to Maxwell Perkins, his editor.

 

Fitzgerald had a motivation for selling the theatrical rights to “Gatsby”: he needed the money. Before the novel-his third-was published, he had hoped that it would sell eighty thousand copies, but the first printing sold fewer than twenty thousand, not even enough to clear his debt to his publisher, Charles Scribner, Jr. In spite of the market’s lukewarm response, Fitzgerald had faith in the originality of his work-he told one correspondent that the novel “contains such prose as has never been written in America before”-and was initially dismayed by Davis’s efforts at adaptation, at least according to Rennie, who described the evening to a newspaper reporter some months later: “Scott doesn’t know the first thing about writing plays, and while he saw the fine skeleton of the play, he missed the subtleties of his own imagery.” Fitzgerald may have been further unsettled by some of Davis’s inventions, such as the character of Sally, Daisy’s “middle-aged colored servant,” who says things like “Dat aint no falsehood-Jes’ fo’ a young lady of quality to tell her Ma dat she is where she aint.”

 

Fitzgerald did not travel to New York for the play’s opening night, in February, 1926, or for any later performances. But the production, which was directed by George Cukor, ran for four months in New York before moving to Chicago. Reviews were overwhelmingly favorable, with critics praising the work’s documentary veracity-exactly the dimension of the novel that Fitzgerald hoped readers would see beyond. (He had asked Perkins if there was a way to advertise the book as something other than a Jazz Age novel: “to avoid such phrases as ‘a picture of New York life,’ or ‘modern society.'”) Walter Winchell, writing in the New York Evening Graphic, praised the play’s “genuine, true-to-life characters, who speak our language, the language employed by this so-called jazz era.”

 

Some reviewers remarked upon the inferiority of Davis’s work compared with Fitzgerald’s. “Of course the play is not the wonderwork that the book is,” Percy Hammond wrote in the New York Herald Tribune. (Among Davis’s infidelities was the story’s conclusion: in the place of the murder of Gatsby in his swimming pool, his neglected funeral, and Nick Carraway’s famously lyrical expression of disillusionment, Davis had the curtain fall on Gatsby being shot dead in his library, with Nick, Daisy, Jordan, and Tom Buchannan looking on in horror.) Davis himself was pleased with his effort, according to an essay he contributed to the Times when the play opened. “When I was at work on ‘The Great Gatsby’ I hated Fitzgerald with a deadly hatred,” he wrote. “I couldn’t for the life of me see why this boy, half my age, should be able to write a better yarn than I could possibly write. At last I made up my mind to get even with him by spoiling his story, but the thing insisted on coming out all right.”

 

David’s triumph is now so obscure that it seems only two libraries in the country have a copy, one of them the Library of Congress. There are no surviving prints of a silent-movie version, which was based on Davis’s play and was released later in 1926, though a trailer for the movie offers a glimpse of what has been lost: a uniformed Gatsby (Warner Baxter) clutching a bob-headed Daisy (Lois Wilson); a gaggle of women diving into a pool, ducking for gold pieces tossed there by Gatsby.

 

Over the decades, “Gatsby,” like many great novels, has proved resistant to adaptation. A second Hollywood attempt was made in 1949; Richard Maibaum, the movie’s producer and co-writer, wrote an assay for The Daily Compass on the difficulty of modifying the book for the screen, allowing that he had taken “one whopping license. We ‘disenchanted’ him, and shot him down at the moment of his awakening. Rightly or wrongly, we felt this was the only way to give him tragic stature.” Manny Farber, in The Nation, was not persuaded by the strategy, writing that the movie’s “characters are like great lumps of oatmeal maneuvering at random around each other.

 

A version made in 1974 was hardly more successful. Directed by Jack Clayton, it was written by Francis Ford Coppola and starred Robert Redford as Gatsby and Mia Farrow as Daisy. As glossy as a Gatsby party in its production values, it included an overabundance of vintage vehicles, low-angle shots of dancing flappers, golden sunlight on emerald lawns, and ponderous pauses. Writing in the Times, Vincent Canby said that the film “moves spaniel-like through F. Scott Fitzgerald’s text, sniffing and staring at events and objects very close up with wide, mopey eyes, seeing almost everything and comprehending nothing.” A fourth, entirely forgettable version appeared on television in 2000.

 

In 2006, a new attempt was made to bring “Gatsby” to Broadway. The show, written by Simon Levy and directed by David Esbjornson, had an out-of-town tryout at the Guthrie Theatre, in Minneapolis. Its approach was the opposite of that of “Gatz.” In an author’s note, Levy writes that “the described stage setting is the idealized version of the play played out against a larger-than-life mythic backdrop where spectacular production elements substitute for the lyric beauty of Fitzgerald’s descriptive prose.” The actor playing Gatsby drives a replica of a 1925 Rolls Royce onto the stage; elsewhere, the stage directions call for Nick Carraway and Gatsby actually to fly in Gatsby’s hydroplane. “What a machine!” Gatsby cries; “Fantastic!” Nick says, using a colloquialism that Fitzgerald never employed in the novel. Variety deemed the show “less than satisfying,” and the Broadway plan was shelved.

 

Members of Elevator Repair Service first came up with the notion of making a play out of “The Great Gatsby” in 1990, when Steve Bodow, one of the group’s original members, brought the book to a rehearsal, and proposed it as potential material to John Collins, the company’s founder and director. Bodow, who is tall and animated, recalls, “I had recently turned thirty, like Nick Carraway, and it was describing a New York that was not dissimilar to New York at the height of the Internet boom, when it was feeling like a pretty frothy place.” (He has since left the company, and is now the head writer for “The Daily Show.”)

 

At first, there was an impulse to do “Gatsby” using puppets made from household objects-Nick Carraway was to have been played by a thermos flask-but when Bodow sought to acquire the rights to the work, he was told that the deal for the TV movie, then in production, prohibited rival adaptations. So Collins and Bodow set the idea aside, though an aluminum thermos flask, to which googly eyes have been affixed, does make a cameo appearance in “Gatz”-Carraway pours tea out of it in Chapter 5.

 

Collins founded Elevator Repair Service in 1991, soon after he graduated from Yale. The name derives from a job-aptitude test, intended for the non-college-bound, that Collins took for fun when he was twelve or thirteen. Collins, who is courtly and subdued in manner, had directed productions as an undergraduate: his first full-length show, “The Real Many Ann,” was based on “Alice in Wonderland” and was performed in the basement of Pierson College. (“Every experimental director has to go through an ‘Alice in Wonderland’ thing, and John was very lucky to have gotten his out very early,” James Hannaham, a novelist and a journalist who was an early member of the company, says.) Collins met Bodow, also a Yale graduate, when they were both temping at Chase Manhattan Bank, booking golfing trips for executives; their first collaboration, at the downtown space Nada, was a production of a Dadaist play by Tristan Tzara, called “Mr. Antipyrene, Fire Extinguisher,” which they set in an office. The development process was collaborative and improvisational, and the production sought to preserve that sense of spontaneity: Brian Parks, writing approvingly in the Village Voice, noted that “actors lurch around the stage, fall dead, burst in to silent songs amidst a jangle of fluorescent lights, impossibly garbled phone calls, and spewed Post-its.”

 

With very few exceptions, E.R.S. doesn’t do plays; productions typically consist of witty, pop-culture-inflected takes on found texts. The shows are developed over many months, and incorporate innovative sound and lighting, as well as dance and physical comedy. Collins likes to say that after working on a project for eighteen months, or two years, he and his teams end up with a script, rather than the other way around. At times, an E.R.S. show can seem like a parody of high-low cultural gamesmanship: Stuff Ivy Leaguers Like. “Cab Legs,” which played at P.S. 122 in 1997, was a barely recognizable version of “Summer and Smoke,” by Tennessee Williams-the cast learned the lines, and then paraphrased them in performance-combined with Cab Calloway-inspired dance moves. “Highway to Tomorrow,” which opened at HERE, the Off Off Broadway space, in 1999, combined Afro-beat and Euripides’ “The Bacchae,” and was performed with puppets (including the thermos flask). The company is not above garnering the odd cheap laugh. In “Gatz,” Scott Shepherd, speaking as Carraway, is interrupted by a ringing telephone as he confides, “I decided to go East and learn the”-he picks up the receiver and finishes the line with a salesman’s urgency-“bond business!” To appreciate the company, it helps to have a taste for cleverness.

 

In addition to “The Great Gatsby,” the company has produced stage versions of “The Sound and the Fury” and “The Sun Also Rises,” composing a trilogy of American literary modernism. At the outset, there was no particular intension to do a series of books on stage. One day, though the company members asked themselves, “What would we never do?” As Collins recalls it, “Steve Bodow, half-joking, answered something to the effect of ‘Well, the thing we’d never do is repeat ourselves deliberately, so let’s do that.’ The pressure to reinvent ourselves would be even greater, given a similar task.” Collins does sometimes worry, though, that the company is doomed “to become known as ‘that group that does novels.'”

 

For “The Sound and the Fury (April Seventh, 1928),” the company tackles the book’s first chapter. The text is not performed as a monologue, even though Faulkner, in a sense, wrote it as one. Rather, the free-associative recollections of Benjy Compson, the mentally impaired man who narrates the chapter, are voiced by other actors, embodying members of the Compson household, as they swirl around a largely mute, quivering Benjy, played by Susie Sokol-a gamine, quizzical woman, and a founding member of the company, who is also a second-grade teacher at St. Ann’s School, in Brooklyn. In “The Sun Also Rises (The Select),” the company distills Hemingway’s hardboiled prose yet further, editing out narration but preserving much of the dialogue, thereby “finding the play in the novel,” as Collins puts it. The result is a more conventional piece of drama than the Fitzgerald and Faulkner adaptations, but the show shares the same smart physical humor, and is also set in one evocative location: a Parisian café. For furniture, there is little more than a few chairs and tables, some of which transform, variously, into Jake Barnes’s bed, his desk, a riverbank, and even a raging bull. Romero is played by Sokol, who wears a richly embroidered jacket, red leggings, and a prosthetic penis.

Despite the Fitzgerald estate’s lack of cooperation for a New York performance, in 2003 the company returned to “The Great Gatsby.” At the time, the members were borrowing rehearsal space from the Wooster Group, the avant-garde theatre company in Soho. In a cluttered administrative room, they began reading the novel aloud to each other-interrogating the source material is the start of any E.R.S. project-and the notion of setting the story in an office emerged. The company prepared to stage the novel in January, 2005, with the hope that it would finally secure permission to do so in New York; days before the show was scheduled to open, permission was denied again.

 

Public performances of “Gatz” were cancelled, but E.R.S. went ahead with private workshops for invited guests, including the directors of many international festivals, who booked productions in Oslo, Zurich, Vienna, Lisbon, and Sydney, among other cities. (In non-English-speaking countries, summaries are provided, and audience members often have the book open in their laps throughout, as if taking an exam.) In November, 2009, the Fitzgerald estate finally granted the rights to present “Gatz” in New York. 

Elizabeth LeCompte, the director of the Wooster Group, says that the production’s power derives, in part, from the juxtaposition of the glamour evoked by the text and the quotidian surroundings in which “Gatz” unfolds. “It is a fantastic take on a kind of American romanticism, and it kind of explodes it,” she told me. “You are watching Scott Shepherd construct it as he is reading it-you are watching him turn the other actors into this characters. He does it by the will of his need. It can only happen over time, because slowly you go with him, and you see it as he sees it, and it is always double, and the two things totally meld.”

 

There are other revelations in the production. “Gatz” restores to “The Great Gatsby” a sense of humor, which, given the novel’s iconic, classroom status, has somewhat leached away. The excruciating tea party in Nick’s cottage at the start of Chapter 5, where Gatsby contrives to come face to face with Daisy, is polished slapstick. (When Shepherd reads that “Gatsby, his hands still in his pockets, was reclining against the mantelpiece in a strained counterfeit of perfect ease,” Jim Fletcher, the actor who plays Gatsby, leans at a sixty-degree angle against the backrest of an office chair, deadpan.) When Gatsby forces the unwilling Mr. Klipspringer to play the piano-thereby revealing his insidious, brutal dominance at the moment he most wishes to demonstrate to Daisy his devotion-Mike Iveson, the actor playing Klipspringer, sits behind the black leather couch, as if behind a piano, and sings “The Love Nest” in a rendition that combines comedy with mounting terror. Fletcher does not look like other theatrical Gatsbys: he is saturnine, hulking, and almost completely bald. The sentence “Sometimes in the course of gay parties women used to rub champagne into his hair,” from Chapter 6, has become a laugh line. But Fletcher may be the first Gatsby who matches a key description from the book: “He looked-and this is said in all contempt for the babbled slander of his garden-as if he had ‘killed a man.'” (Robert Redford, at the equivalent moment, lLooked as if he had swallowed a lemon.) Fletcher’s Gatsby is more an obsessive wiseguy than a brooding romantic.

 

In the fall of 2006, the show had its American debut, at the Walker Art Center, in Minneapolis. Quinton Skinner, in Variety, hailed the production as “revelatory and exuberant,” adding that it “illuminates a familiar text, breathing strange new life into it while honoring its inherent completeness.”

 

Jim Fletcher, when asked what he has learned about the character of Gatsby in the five or so years that he has been playing him, said, “He’s from Lake Superior, his parents were farmers. He’s a soldier, a bit of a gangster. And he is in love. But I have to say that I am not trying to bring out the Gatsby that I have come to understand. What I am doing is committing to the book.” His performance, he explained, does not involve figuring out Jay Gatsby’s motivations, or trying to get inside his character’s soul. He also doesn’t regard it as his responsibility to wring emotion from the text. “When we were first working on the show, some of the cast were figuring out how to play it psychologically,” he said. “But it’s not psychological-it’s musical. It’s temporal. The psychology happens because everybody in the room has psychology.”

 

Everybody in the room, audience and cast alike, experiences “Gatz” as an event-one that is, by turns, thrilling, amusing, and enervating. Collins says that he sometimes wishes he could edit out the incident, in Chapter 9, when Nick Carraway revisits Meyer Wolfsheim in his office. “I have a very sensitive audience-shifting-in-their-chairs meter, and the needle always bounces a little right there,” he told me. “The novel just comes so close to being perfectly scored for theatre that it’s mildly frustrating to me that there are places where it doesn’t perfectly translate.” Fletcher compares the rhythm of “Gatsby” to that of a football game: “The third quarter is when the game is in darkness-everyone is tired, you did all you could in the first half, so what do you do when you have no energy left? Then, in the fourth quarter, the adrenaline drives you.”

 

Watching “Gatz” is a heightened version of reading the book oneself, including the same moments of riveted attention and mental wandering. Part of the power of “Gatz” may lie in the way in which it requires the audience’s submission to the exclusive experience of reading, without the distractions of family, television, laptop, or iPhone. Being shut up in a darkened theatre with “Gatz” is a strangely potent way to reproduce the increasingly elusive sensation of being enraptured by a book.

 

James Rennie, the first theatrical Gatsby, was wrong when he said that “Scott doesn’t know the first thing about writing plays.” Fitzgerald has written revues at Princeton, to the detriment of his formal education, and in 1922 he completed a political satire, “The Vegetable.” Featuring a railway clerk who stumbles into becoming President, “The Vegetable” opened for tryouts in Atlantic City in November, 1923, and was received harshly. “People were so obviously bored!” Zelda Fitzgerald wrote to a friend afterward. “And it was all very well done, do there was no use trying to fix it up. The idea was what people didn’t like-just hopeless!” Published as a book, it was hardly better reviewed. “Ever since he started to write, Mr. Fitzgerald has been regarded by most of us critics with all the hearty cordiality displayed toward an aggressive fourteen-year-old infant prodigy freshman during his first week on a college campus,” Frederic F. Van de Water wrote in the New York Tribune. “It was been difficult for is to forgive him his brilliance. Now that he has written ‘The Vegetable’ it should be easier.”

 

Fitzgerald was deeply disappointed by the failure; it was, he said, one of the inspirations for the theme of disillusionment in “The Great Gatsby.” If “Gatz” succeeds where other adaptations have failed, it may be because, in juxtaposing the lushness of Fitzgerald’s prose and the squalor of the office surroundings, the show finds an objective correlative for Nick Carraway’s, and Fitzgerald’s, disillusionment-a feeling that started with a failure in Atlantic City, but ended up informing an indelible American Fable. After Fitzgerald began writing “The Great Gatsby,” he characterized that theme of disillusionment in a letter to a friend. He did so in terms that might serve to describe the theatre, when it works: “those illusions that give such color to the world so that you don’t care whether things are true or false as long as they partake of the magical glory.”