Gatsby-Marathon: Reading It Out Loud

by Karin Veraart

It sounds like there’s a major road nearby, cars racing along, now and then a horn honking. So this small gray office might be part of a garage — where the somewhat colorless personnel manage accounts and perform routine tasks with long faces: sorting mail, answering a phone, looking over a file, typing a letter. Sighing a little. In a word, tedium.

Until one day a computer stops working, and the man at this machine pulls out a ragged copy of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and starts to read. Suddenly the roaring twenties roll into the soul-killing room and everything takes on a whole new look — as if reality just made a u-turn.

So unfolds Gatz, a theatrical tour-de-force from the New York company Elevator Repair Service (ERS), a small collective of nonconformist theatermakers, developers, and writers organized around director John Collins. They take The Great Gatsby, the “Great American Novel” from 1925 about a group of people in that exuberant, almost lawless period after the First World War, the “Jazz Age,” and in roughly six and a half hours they turn it into their Gatz. Just how a set of drab office types manage to make the glamour world of the ruthlessly rich Jay Gatsby their own is fascinating to watch, exciting and funny and extremely well thought out.

Until recently ERS had not gone public with Gatz: for years they have had difficulties with the trustees of Fitgerald’s estate, which is why the piece didn’t premiere until this month at the Kunstenfestivaldesarts in Brussels. By then it had already attained an underground cult status in New York, with semi-secret private showings in an obscure location.

But in the process Gatz was able to develop into what it is: a theater piece based on the book that doesn’t give up any of its “bookness”: every word is read. Read by actor Scott Shepherd, who in this way also introduces himself as the narrator of the book, Nick Carraway. Nick is an outsider marvelling at the wealth of his mysterious neighbor Gatsby (whose real name is James Gatz) and his friends.

Shepherd is, at the same time, the office guy with the broken computer. Once he gets caught up in the book he will not put it down, and little by little his beleaguered coworkers are drawn into it too — literally — until it’s no longer clear where the office ends and the luxurious world of champagne, jazz, French bobs and hip trousers begins.

The dowdy clerk becomes a beautiful Daisy Buchanan, the plump typist a warm-blooded Myrtle Wilson, and the balding man, the stiffest of the bunch, a captivating Jay Gatsby. Now and again a jetset party gets out of hand and the file folders go flying all around — only to be buried again in the file cabinets the next morning, without a word.

There is no outward similarity between the Gatsbys and the office workers, which makes for comic situations, and moments when the workers specifically try to mimic the description (“he looked at her intently”) are often funny. Also remarkable is how fittingly the emptiness of office life finds reflection in the vague boredom of Fitzgerald’s characters.

The performance can be seen in two parts, but a “marathon” is well worth the trouble: also to wonder at Shepherd, who is just reading along and then, almost without you noticing, he shuts the book and plays the last part “normally.” Very strong.