Baring The Heart, Soul, Of ‘Gatsby’

by Hedy Weiss

Among the many things you might well find yourself thinking about if you are lucky enough to catch today’s final Chicago performance of “Gatz” at the Museum of Contemporary Art Theatre — a marathon seven-hour theatricalized reading of the full text of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 masterpiece, “The Great Gatsby” — is that no matter how lucid the book might be, no high school student assigned to read it should ever be expected to comprehend it.

For here is a story about self-invention, self-deception, social class, geographical differences marriage, adultery, friendship, money, the power of dreams and the thudding ache of failure that requires a lifetime to fully comphrehend. Never mind that Fitzgerald himself was not event 30 when his book was published; there IS such a thing as genius.

In its strangely seductive, often revelatory, and altogether ingenious production, the New York-based Elevator Repair Service ensemble, under the direction of John Collins, literally strips the Jazz Age glitz and glamor from Fitzgerald’s story, and in the process fully bares the hearts and souls of the book’s characters. The production’s essential conceit is that a group of office workers — in the impossibly dreary offices of what appears to be a doomed business — compulsively begin to read Fitzgerald’s novel aloud. Their understated, even deadpan voices embody the death of all American dreams, whether in love or dealmaking, and at the same time comically hint at possible undercurrents in the workers’ own relationships.

And it is all but impossible to watch this production at the current moment without thinking about how an audience of former Lehman Brothers or General Motors employees might respond to it.

As in the novel, it is Nick Carraway who serves as the story’s principal witness and moral authority. And Scott Shepherd’s seemingly effortless, entirely hypnotic performance not only sustains the ideal timbre and tone for this daylong enterprise, but strikes a perfect balance of wonder and revulsion. Shepherd also beautifully suggests how Nick’s emotional detachment gradually morphs into a far more feverish response to the immensely passionate and madly romantic gangster, Gatsby (the boxer-like Jim Fletcher), to whom Tom and Daisy Buchanan (Gary Wilmes and Tory Vazquez), those rich and “careless people” who casually lay waste to all who come in contact with them, and to the essentially dishonest but alluringly screwed-up young golf pro, Jordan Baker (Susie Sokol), who briefly entices Nick.

Mike Iveson’s zany turn as a pianist brings the show’s first act to a rolicking climax. And throughout, sound designer Ben Williams oversees the complex audio tour of New York and Long Island that makes “Gatz” a searing portrait of a place, as well as an era. No matter how many times you may have read “Gatsby,” you will hear many things for the very first time in “Gatz.”

View the original article on the Chicago Sun-Times website here .