She Only Loves Me

“The Great Gatsby” is a grim tragedy of undying love.

by Kester Freriks

The theater company Elevator Repair Service performs F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel “The Great Gatsby” in the marathon “Gatz.” Office workers become characters in the story as the entire book is read aloud.

Gatsby, the “great Gatsby”: his name goes whispering over everyone’s lips. He is the vigorous, filthy rich, virile yet sensitive title character from the 1925 novel “The Great Gatsby” by the American author F. Scott Fitzgerald.

“Gatsby?” women ask. “What Gatsby?”

The lonesome, mysterious young millionaire living in a mansion on Long Island east of New York stirs everyone’s imagination. The same women melt at the sound of his name, and lose themselves in rumors: Gatsby is a nephew “or something” of the German Kaiser, he is a murderer, an oil baron, a con man.

As Jay Gatsby — his actual name — in the 1974 film, Robert Redford had sky-blue eyes. Other film stars such as Warner Baxter (1926) and Alan Ladd (1949) also portrayed Gatsby as a broad-shouldered, strapping young man with a piercing glance. In these three films they conduct themselves the way rich Americans conduct themselves, at least in Fitzgerald’s imaginary world: they give parties, play golf, pour champagne, destroy marriages, feel bored.

But this is not the only possibility. The New York company Elevator Repair Service has been working for almost ten years on a presentation of Fitzgerald’s famous Jazz Age novel. Their piece, “Gatz,” which will be shown next week at the Holland Festival, plays itself out in a dingy office, stuffed with storage boxes, obsolete nonworking computers and piles of paper. Glamor is nowhere to be seen. Evidently the office is located in the heart of the city: outside the muffled horns of taxicabs groan like foghorns.

The stage version “Gatz” comes with a flavor of the illegal. The group has been involved in a years-long struggle with the estate of Fitzgerald, who died in 1940 at the age of 44. In New York the performance could only be seen in underground theaters, in an effort to escape the estate’s attention. In spite of this, the estate denied permission for the adaptation.

For director John Collins it was clear that he did not want a flirtation with Hollywood — or indeed an adaptation at all. As a result, “Gatz” became something unique: one of the office drones has a compulsive urge to read the entire book out loud, roughly 200 pages, in a theater marathon that, including breaks, runs from six pm to two in the morning.

During a European tour Elevator Repair Service presented Gatz as part of the KunstenFestivaldesArts in Brussels. After the marathon is over, actor Scott Shepherd, who has read page after page without interruption, is not exhausted at all. He says: “There’s only one way to get the depth of the book, and that’s to read it out loud. Every adaptation runs into trouble when it starts retelling the plot. That’s not what we’re trying to do. For us it’s about the whole atmosphere.”

His performance in “Gatz” is unparalleled. It is intoxicating to listen to Fitzgerald’s elegant prose hour after hour, as if it were a music of words. And, admittedly, it is also tiring. There are no supertitles, only a short summary for each chapter. “If we had supertitles,” the actor says, “nobody would ever look at the stage.”

Director John Collins has led the company since 1991. They are based in Brooklyn but showed the piece in Manhattan above a small downtown theater. (Earlier they were housed in a building with a broken elevator, hence the name.) In a grungy room Collins and two of his actors began to read “The Great Gatsby,” starting with the scenes between Gatsby himself and the narrator of the book, the humble bond salesman Nick Carraway. The environment of the office was there from the beginning.

The introduction of this environment is actually quite simple. The show begins one morning in the middle of the work week. Nick Carraway is fiddling with his computer. It refuses to work. He stabs at the keys insistently. When that produces no result, he mashes the whole keyboard with his open hand. He calls up a man from the computer repair service, who discovers that the employee has not plugged the keyboard in. With a shrug he takes the keyboard away.

The employee has a very particular reason for abusing his computer. Hidden away in a card file he keeps his favorite book, “The Great Gatsby,” and he would rather read that out loud than work. He has no use for the pile of papers on his desk. Now and then he sweeps them all to the floor in a single movement, then feels guilty and hastily picks them up again. Scott Shepherd as Nick Carraway opens to the first page and begins his great undertaking: “In my younger and more vulnerable years…”

The spectators in the French Théâtre National de la Communauté hear the name Gatsby repeatedly. Each time, I look toward the office door with the glass window in it, expecting to see an 80s-playboy Gatsby appear there. So do the typists and secretaries. Where is Mr Gatsby? Who is Mr Gatsby?

Glancing over at the office drone at regular intervals as he reads aloud is his fellow drone, dressed in brown, a bald man with a broad forehead. He is evidently becoming irritated with his colleague’s mania. But Scott Shepherd manages to win him over with his fluent, compelling voice. And it is not just this man who is growing more and more enthralled, but everyone else in the dusty office too. Gradually, they become participants in the world of Fitzgerald’s novel.

At one point the door swings wide open, and there is Gatsby, finally. The clerk across from Carraway has sneaked away and changed into a hot-pink suit. He has flamboyant gleaming shoes on, and a blue overshirt with a bright yellow necktie. The clash of colors is painful to the eye. This is a whole different Gatsby from the Hollywood triplet Baxter-Ladd-Redford. He spreads out his arms as if in an amateur performance, much too excessive and sentimental, one foot gracefully in front of the other, as if to say: “Check me out…”

Stage adaptations of novels have been legion in recent years. In most, and often the worst, cases, the theater follows the storyline or the actors learn chunks of text from the novel by heart. Director Collins of Elevator Repair Service goes in the opposite direction: he doesn’t wrestle the novel into the straitjacket of theater. Fitzgerald’s book casts a spell over the characters onstage, who at first have nothing to do with the world of the novel. Nevertheless they fall prey to it, almost against their will. The result is a sublime form of literary theater. Collins says: “The boring day-to-day activity in the office seemed like an ideal backdrop for the dreamworld of the well-to-do that Fitzgerald describes.”

Looked at this way, it’s a nice touch that the one office clerk has no idea at first that the other one will become Gatsby. They see each other as colorless and project their dreams on each other. All of the characters are afflicted with a longing for money, privilege and the high life. The secretaries and typists metamorphosize into the women that the novel centers around: the gorgeous Daisy, the golf champion Jordan Baker, and the somewhat vulgar Myrtle Wilson. The vigorous doorman or security man Tom Buchanan is Daisy’s jealous husband.

In the end Buchanan arranges to provide us with the gripping drama that “The Great Gatsby” actually is: he gives a garage owner instructions to murder Gatsby in his swimming pool. Gatsby knows Daisy from an earlier time, and offends Tom to the core when he insists that Daisy never loved her husband, only him, “the great Gatsby.”

Fitzgerald may be known as the cronicler of the frivolous Roaring Twenties or the licentious Jazz Age, but his novel is a grim tragedy of undying love. At the end of the show actor Scott Shepherd sits alone behind his desk, which in the meantime has been completely cleared off. Only the revolver is left there glittering on the tabletop. He reads out the imposing final paragraphs, finishing with the unforgettable last line: “So we beat on, boats against the current, born back ceaselessly into the past.”

“Gatz” emphasizes what the Hollywood films omit: the novel is Nick’s look back. He is a young man come from the midwest to the east coast to try his luck. Gatsby represents everything the young man despises. Embittered he comes “back west,” where life is not corrupt.

This coincides strikingly with the life of F. Scott Fitzgerald, a westerner from Minneapolis-St. Paul, the twin cities in the west. Here is the “warm center” of the American continent, says Fitzgerald. But no one goes unpunished to the east coast, to the big city.

There they have parties that end irrevocably in jealousy, adultery and murder, organized by a mysterious man named Gatsby.