Borne Back Ceaselessly Into The Past

by Ben Brantley

The most compelling love affair being conducted on a New York stage this season isn’t between a man and woman. (Or a man and a man, a woman and a woman or a boy and a horse.) It is between a man and a book.

“Gatz,” the work of singular imagination and intelligence that opened Wednesday night at the Public Theater, chronicles one reader’s gradual but unconditional seduction by a single, ravishing novel. That novel happens to be perhaps the finest written by an American, “The Great Gatsby,” F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 tale of pursuing the unattainable in the Jazz Age. And it is presented in its word-for-word entirety over the course of nearly seven hours by Elevator Repair Service, a heroic company that dares to venture into literary realms where theater artists are known to sink and drown. (Its other adaptations included Hemingway’s “Sun Also Rises” and Faulkner’s “Sound and the Fury.”)

But while this show, directed by John Collins, does full justice to the inherent and often startling drama in “The Great Gatsby,” what’s most purely dramatic about it isn’t in Fitzgerald’s plot. It’s in that elusive chemistry that takes place between a reader and a gorgeous set of sentences that demand you follow them wherever they choose to go. Think of it as a morning-fresh variation on an ancient theatrical formula: Boy meets book. Boy gets book. Boy becomes lost in book.

The romantic lead, portrayed by the astonishing Scott Shepherd, is in this case an ennui-laden, underworked fellow who, in the play’s opening scene, materializes in a shabby office that might as well have “dead end” on its door.

Waiting for a sluggish computer to start, this correspondingly sleepy-looking man finds a battered paperback lodged in an oversize Rolodex. Idly he opens the book and in a flat voice reads aloud, “In my younger and more vulnerable years…”

Those are the opening words of “The Great Gatsby.” You may remember first encountering them as a teenager in an English class and feeling about as enthusiastic as this actor initially sounds. It will take a page or two before the quizzical detachment leaves the voice of Mr. Shepherd, whose perusal is regularly interrupted by people— bored, boring-looking people— arriving at the office.

But there comes a point when Mr. Shepherd’s reader is ineluctably hooked by the book. And as curiosity is succeed by engagement, which turns into “I can’t live without you” infatuation, the ratio between the realities of the novel and the workplace tilt increasingly in favor of fiction. Oh, the name of Mr. Shepherd’s character? Call him Nick. The program does. That’s Nick as in Nick Carraway, the uncompromisingly honest narrator of “Gatsby.”

The blurring of Nick the reader into Nick the narrator is, I promise you, unlike anything you’ve ever seen in the theater. From the beginning the two figures share a Midwestern accent and a plain, unmistakably American attractiveness that doesn’t call attention to itself. This neutrality is a perfect starting point for the rendering of a novel in which a reticent man finds himself drawn increasingly into the more flamboyant lives of others, particularly of one mysterious tycoon named Jay Gatsby and a reckless rich girl called Daisy.

Nick is and isn’t the only character in “Gatz.” There are other performers onstage, a dozen of them, and they’re all first rate. They portray the other workers in Nick the reader’s office and, eventually, the other characters in Nick the narrator’s book. This metamorphosis, though, occurs by ingeniously sly degrees, and it seems to be taking place entirely in the reader’s mind.

Do you know the feeling of living with a novel that so absorbs you that you start to imagine everyone around you as a character in it? It’s this layering of a novel’s world onto your own everyday environment that’s happening here. Thus the office cut-up— a trim, sporty woman who kills time leafing through golf magazines— morphs into Jordan Baker (Susie Sokol), the amoral golfer and partygoer who becomes Nick’s girlfriend.

That macho, self-impressed fellow with the keys on his belt? He turns into Tom Buchanan (Gary Wilmes), Nick’s former classmate and the husband of Nick’s cousin, Daisy (Victoria Vazquez, who as the office’s best-dressed employee is a natural for the part). As for the boss, a tall, laconic and imposing man who doesn’t seem to share much with his fellow workers, well of course he has to be Gatsby (Jim Fletcher).

It’s unlikely that these actors, except possibly Mr. Wilmes, would be cast in these parts in a full-dress, conventional “Gatsby.” But Nick’s vision magically bestows upon them all the traits they require. And because it is the reader’s idea of them (and you come to identify with the reader the way he identifies with Nick Carraway), you don’t get that disappointment that so often comes when actors fail to live up to your expectations of a character. Who, ultimately, could satisfyingly incarnate Gatsby, in any literal way? (Robert Redford sure couldn’t in the 1974 film version, nor do I think could Leonardo DiCaprio, who is being talked about for a remake.)

In “Gatz” I never felt any jarring discrepancy between actors and roles. Mr. Collins’s brilliantly paced production endows Mr. Shepherd’s character with the godlike powers conferred on a reader by a great novelist. We the audience are the vicarious creators of Nick and Daisy and Gatsby, not to mention the abject, vulgar Myrtle (Laurena Allan), Tom’s mistress, and George, her blue-collar sad sack of a husband (Aaron Landsman).

A similar transformation is undergone by that dreary, dusty office (designed by Louisa Thompson). It remains, technically, what it is from the beginning. But with the help of stealthily brilliant sound design (by Ben Williams) and lighting (Mark Barton), it becomes— thoroughly and indisputably— Gatsby’s vast Long Island pleasure palace; Myrtle’s cramped and squalid New York apartment; and a hot, shadow-shrouded hotel room at the Plaza on one fateful summer afternoon. And I won’t spoil the pleasure of your discovering how the dispersal of office paperwork can evoke the bleary, sordid soul of a drunken party.

But more than anything, Fitzgerald’s narrative rhythms, as interpreted by Mr. Shepherd, are what create the specific configurations of time and space, as the reader’s enthusiasm, excitement and agitation meld with those of the narrator. You’re so caught up in those rhythms that you don’t realize until afterward how amazing this show’s accomplishment is. Books and theater are different arts, and they frame reality in different ways. This is the first time I have ever felt those frames become one.

For the record, “Gatz” never seems long in the telling, and this is the second time I’ve seen it. There’s a clock onstage that Mr. Shepherd regularly consults. On it the time is always the same (9:38, I believe). This is as it should be. All normal rules for measuring time are suspended in that beautiful twilight zone that exists between words on paper and the mind’s eye.

View the original article on The New York Times website here .