The Novel As Novel

Fabulous American guest performance with nearly 7 hours of “reading”

by Therese Bjørnboe

The American theater company Elevator Repair Service’s current guest performance in Norway of Scott Fitzgerald’s novel “The Great Gatsby” offers an opportunity to contemplate some of the problems associated with dramatizing novels for the stage.

“Gatz is not a staging of Fitzgerald’s novel, but a sort of staged reading,” states the press release from the Black Box Theater. This description is only partly correct, because as I stagger out of the theater after seven hours and the clock is approaching two in the morning, I have no doubt that I have been to the theater. Even if the performance has handled the variables in a slightly different way than one is used to.

The stage picture consists of an office landscape, and this puts us a great distance away from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel, which takes place in American high society during the “Roaring Twenties.” An office worker (Scott Shepherd) comes in and sits down at a computer which he can’t get to work. File cabinets, shelves and furnishings give the room a shabby feel, and one senses a faint echo of both Marx’s alienation principle and Buster Keaton.

Our man pulls out a dog-eared copy of “The Great Gatsby,” which he begins to read aloud. At first he keeps his reading hidden from other people: the boss, the messenger, the security guard, the secretary, and the rest of the group, whoever they may be (the actors actually look like normal people and not like actors).

But little by little things happen that tell us reality and fiction are mingling in our reader’s mind. One line from the novel slips out of the messenger’s mouth, then a dialogue is played out, and eventually whole scenes from the book. During the almost seven hours that the show runs, the breaks (when you come back to “real time” at the office) become more and more infrequent, until finally, when Scott Shepherd sits alone again at his desk, dog-eared paperback in hand, it’s impossible to distinguish between him as the “reader” and as “Nick” (the novel’s narrator). By this time I had long ago been pulled inside the world of the novel.

According to the director, “Gatz” grew out of a rehearsal process where the actors performed with scripts “in hand”. After they cut unnecessary passages and words like “he said,” they felt as if the integrity of the text had been lost, and ultimately it became clear to them that they would have to retain every single word.

With this kind of “text fetishism” ERS can be said to be bucking modern theater’s idée fixe that freedom to play with a text (any text it wants to) is in itself the guarantee and foundation of theater’s position as its own medium or independent art form. This attitude can be traced back to (among others) the Russian theater innovator Stanislavski, who claimed that the audience came to theater to see subtext; books were read at home.

And of course this is correct. But if theater wants to expand its vocabulary by dramatizing novels rather than staging dramas, it becomes a paradox to deal with these texts by finding the play “within,” a show that one “puts on its feet” by removing all the excess details, digressions, everything that makes the text an epic narrative. In this case the idea is to capture the spirit of the text, not the letter. But where does that leave the author’s voice?

Elevator Repair Service goes in the opposite direction, by regarding the author’s voice and language as just as essential as narrative and characterization. But even if we call the result a staged reading, “Gatz” is also a performance that, in the highest degree, reflects on itself as a piece of theater.

In accordance with Stanislavski’s dictum, we go to the theater to see interpretation. This means, among other things, that we expect psychological excavation and an interpretive experience of character.

In this production we don’t get that, but director John Collins investigates the optics of theater in a way that doesn’t remind me of anything I’ve seen before. As with every (good) reading, I see my own pictures, but at the same time I keep my eyes open — as the office transforms and doesn’t transform into Long Island or Manhattan. I see Mia Farrow’s face from the movie, hear the text and watch the actors, who take up the same story that Scott Shepherd is reading — in an illustrative, almost school-play-like manner.

Little time-shifts allow for multiple perspectives between the novel’s text and the mise-en-scene. Scott Shepherd reads, and the story/play follows just afterwards, or the other way around: the actors do something that seems absurd but is explained a moment later by a realistic situation (in the novel).

Picturing the actors from a movie is usually thought to spoil a reader’s ability to create her own images. I suspected instantly that director John Collins had calculated that most of the audience would have some relationship to the movie (or to several versions, in the case of an American audience).

The performance style of “Gatz” can be seen to overcome this, since the actors never go for traditional psychological inner-life but maintain a distance and allow an open intermediate space to establish itself. The effect is that you find yourself in many different times at once — or in a great echo chamber — where Mia Farrow, Robert Redford and others are invited in as special guests, in an exclusive theater which plays itself out for my, and perhaps also your, inner eye simultaneously?!

I said school-play-like. But this description is meant as a compliment to a group of actors who know exactly what they are doing, and who have already, in the office, established characters which are as naturalistically believable as the supporting cast in an American film.

For my part, expectations shot to the roof the moment Scott Shepherd entered. I recognize him from the Wooster Group’s Hamlet, he is a star.

“Gatz” gets its title from Gatsby’s real surname. He is of course an upstart, in contrast to the woman he loves, Daisy, and the man she married, Tom Buchanan, and the name change is part of a larger strategy to change his identity and become a member of the preeminently wealthy. “Daisy has money in her voice” goes one of the key lines from Gatsby to Nick. Because more than it is about love, “The Great Gatsby” is about the almost metaphysical attraction to wealth.

The most remarkable thing about Elevator Repair’s production is that it finds a noticeable congruence between the cold distance of Fitzgerald’s language versus the passion of the narrative, and the (ironic) relationship between anti-illusion and illusion (or illustration) in the performances. Of course, the contrast between the wealth depicted in the book and the low-rent office is an additional element in this reflection.

“Gatz” is not the kind of interpretation one expects in the theater, but God, how precisely it captures the novel. The clue lies in Gatsby’s past (à la Orson Welles’s Rosebud), the moment when he falls for Daisy and which for the rest of his life he pursues and tries to recover. “…into the past” are the novel’s last words, and the last words from Scott Shepherd before the ovation breaks out and the performance goes the way of the flesh like Gatsby has just gone, his corpse lying on the faux-leather couch in the office. The theater is over, the characters dissolved into the air.

“Gatz” ought be mandatory for all people of the theater.