The Show That Made Gatsby Even Greater

by Tim Teeman

John Collins has a problem. He is artistic director of an experimental theatre company, the Elevator Repair Service, that since its inception in 1991 has created productions such as McGurk: A Cautionary Tale (1994), in which a man seduces a woman who is represented by a beer bottle.

Collins thinks of productions as “problems to be solved”, the more fiendish or seemingly impossible to stage the better, so ERS plays are not easy in conception or execution. Thus Gatz, the New York company’s astonishing imagining of “The Great Gatsby”, is on the surface as difficult as an ERS fan could hope for: a word-for-word recitation of the novel by the dazzling Scott Shepherd (all from memory even if he holds the book), while around him action from the novel is acted out by 13 fellow performers, in the setting of a musty office. It is eight hours long, with two 30-minute intervals and a 75-minute dinner break and is simply, brilliantly enthralling.

Collins’s problem is that the arty crowd who are so devoted to ERS’s challenging work are not the only ones enchanted by Gatz: everyone else is too. Over nearly 150 performances, it has sold out in cities including New York, Chicago and Boston. Next come 23 performances in London, then a short Los Angeles run. It was New York magazine’s top theatre show of 2011. Collins has created a hit.

Broadway has been invoked. “Gatz has helped me live more comfortably and the company grow,” says Collins, as we sit in Shepherd’s Lower East Side apartment in New York. “But this show won’t go away. It’s redefined us. It obscures the deeper things I am more interested in. Of course it’s nice to be in this position, but how much do we let the positive effects of Gatz, and performing Gatz, supersede other work?”

Collins has sat through almost every performance, each time seeing things able to be tweaked or improved. But even he accepts his presence will soon not be vital: the show is a sleek thoroughbred.

As for Broadway: “If someone came to us with $4 million in a suitcase,” smiles Collins, “then I guess we’d have to consider it. But I don’t think any of us want to be doing the show as it is now for two years straight. I don’t know if we’d consider turning Gatz into a product. If it becomes a long-running Broadway show, then ERS becomes the playwright. We’d probably have to get other actors. Scott might not want to do that for that length of time.” Shepherd demurs diplomatically: “I don’t like to think about things in the abstract. Let me know what the next offer is.”

Collins’s dedication to experimental theatre is genuine: he was a sound designer for the Wooster Group, the experimental theatre company founded in the mid-1970s, which has featured actors including Steve Buscemi, Frances McDormand and Willem Dafoe. The group taught Collins the pleasures of “working with material that isn’t meant for the stage, material that no one has imagined how to put on stage. At ERS, which didn’t come out of the Wooster Group as many people imagine, we like to spend a long time in rehearsal, with an unfixed idea of what the finished product will look like.”

ERS’s first project was to find a script Salvador Dalí  had written for the Marx Brothers, which they failed to locate, but still managed to “get lots of material from and mount a show”. Gatz is part of a trilogy of literary texts ERS has recently staged: the others are Hemingway’s “The Sun Also Rises” and Faulkner’s “The Sound and the Fury”.

Susie Sokol, who has been with ERS since its foundation and plays Jordan Baker, the narrator Nick Carraway’s lover in Gatz, says it is not uncommon to get “really down in rehearsals, like you’re not getting anywhere, then suddenly to have a breakthrough and everyone is giddy. It feels democratic. We know each other so well, we’re like family. It isn’t free-form improvisation, but something much more organic.” The company is mostly male, and the lead parts in recent shows mainly male. “The company is aware of that,” says Sokol drily, but women are cast in the male roles.

Gatz began life as a “fun little crazy 30-minute version”. At an early stage it was imagined as a “junkie puppet show”, says Collins, with Carraway played by a Thermos flask. The ERS was working out of “a crummy office”, so a crummy office became the setting of the production, with Shepherd’s character an oddball with a mania for reading the book out loud. “We wanted it to be fun, and what kept us motivated was that nothing in the book would be cut,” says Collins. “Even if we failed it would produce an interesting result, and the most interesting result would be if it didn’t fail.” The progress of the production was impeded by Fitzgerald’s estate, which was committed to another stage production of the book. Collins secured the rights to perform Gatz in more cities after two of Fitzgerald’s grandchildren saw, and loved, Gatz.

Shepherd has always had a talent for remembering text: as a boy he could recite books read to him by his mother and the “reward for getting Gatz exactly right is delicious, that’s what makes it stick.” There are no great tricks to his feat: he simply read and read “The Great Gatsby”. “By the end I’m exhausted, but you don’t struggle to get the audience interested in you because they’re interested in the book. When you read the book, you’re on the same side as the narrator.”

Shepherd’s character appears transformed by the act of reading and so are we watching him. When the actor sees people in the lobby afterwards, “they really feel they know you so well, they’ve spent the whole day with you”.

It’s this familiarity, while lucrative and welcome, that Collins is keen to ward off. “One thing I am confronting now is that the next show we make may disappoint a lot of people,” he says. “It’s not going to be a familiar text.” Instead, he reveals, it will be a play about a couple living in a house, “where strange things are going on”, visited by a man called the Representative. “Just beyond their walls another actual play seems to be going on,” he says. Collins is also planning a play featuring verbatim court transcripts of a case in Indiana, “focusing on the First Amendment, freedom of expression”, pitting naked go-go dancers against an Indiana law prohibiting public nudity. Collins’s eyes are glittering: much as he is proud of the all-conquering Gatz, he wants things to be difficult again.

Gatz, Noel Coward Theatre, London WC2 (0844 4825141), June 8 — July 15