A Very Digestible Brick

Record broken at the National Theater: with its six-hour unabridged recitation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s masterpiece, Gatz establishes itself as the grand marathon of the festival. You might be worried about indigestion but this theatrical brick-cake goes down like you would devour a best-seller: without a crumb left behind.

In the hands of the New York company Elevator Repair Service, The Great Gatsby takes on a strange new look, in a dingy New York office. Little inclined to work, one employee pulls out of his paperwork a copy of the American cult novel and plunges into it, reading aloud. Little by little the coincidences accumulate between the story and the seemingly irrelevant activity of his coworkers, until they become one.

In a staging that teems with good ideas, John Collins pulls off the incredible gamble of transposing this story of new riches and passions on lush Long Island into a world of filing and paperwork. A (re)reading full of humor you should absolutely treat yourself to. One condition: understand English fluently or know the story by heart; the subtitles have dropped three-quarters of the text along the way.