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.

 

 

You can read the rest of this article by Rebecca Mead here.