Theatre Review: Weeping for
the Great (and Terrible) Gatz
Jim Fletcher, Scott Shepherd (Joan Marcus)
How It’s New York: Not only is Gatz performed
at the Public Theater, Joe Papp’s vision of a
theater that would bring Shakespeare to the
people along with bold new works. Elevator
Repair Service is a Brooklyn based collective.
How It’s Irish:
F. Scott Fitzgerald, author of The
Great Gatsby, was Irish American, and the book’s roots
in Irish dreams have never been clearer or more
painfully realized.
“So we beat on, boats against the
current, borne back ceaselessly into the
past.” — F. Scott Fitzgerald.
I spent much of Gatz weeping quietly.
At
one point I worried I was about to break out in sobs.
Certainly I was whimpering audibly. It’s important to
put this upfront.
I didn’t “admire” the 6.5 hour marathon theatrical
reading/presentation by Elevator Repair Service
at
the Public Theater of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel
The Great Gatsby.
Naturally, one admires the accomplishment, the
invention, the way they set it in a depressing office
beginning with a bored office worker waiting for his
computer to reboot reading aloud.
And this is all
worth describing, but the main thing to understand
about Gatz is that it takes Fitzgerald’s gorgeous
prose and inhabits it in front of you.
To call it “powerful” isn’t strong
enough. Wrenching, cathartic,
enlightening, unbearable, magnificent.
Any of those would do.
This production by Elevator Repair Service, who are
known for melding word for word readings with theatre,
is a second outing here.
It had an earlier outing at
the Public in 2010. This incarnation runs only through
May 13 (extended from May 6).
It’s really two plays,
with intermissions and a dinner break, on the same
day.
Movies and dramatizations of his story about Jay
Gatsby, aka Jim Gatz, a Midwesterner posing as a man
inherited money, who yearns for his love Daisy even as
he conducts some sort of shady business, usually fail.
What makes the story so powerful isn’t just the
story.
It’s a good story, and in many ways is the
quintessential
story of American ambition, innocence
and
love, but its actions-even its more sensational ones,
as when Daisy’s husband breaks the nose of his
mistress – aren’t what make the novel great.
Narrator Nick Caraway witnesses the thwarted love of a
young man for a somewhat shallow and mercenary woman,
and how innocence is corrupted by the material world –
that’s what we see.
Robert Redford played Gatsby in the 1974 film.
Quick,
who played Nick? (Sam Waterston, for what it’s worth).
Scott Shepherd and Victoria Vazquez
Marcus)
(Joan
But Nick is more than a guide. He’s a conscience, a
fully realized character, he’s a bard.
His reticence, his refusal to judge too harshly –
something he warns us of in the novel’s first sentence
– are heroic. What he sees in Gatsby, we see.
When he
shouts, near the end, “you’re worth the whole lot of
them,” you know it’s completely true.
The man next to me was rubbing his eyes as well.
Nick is clearly the starring role in Gatz.
Scott Shepherd is in every scene, reading, describing
and finally, flipping through the book and just
acting.He’s fair-haired, Midwestern sounding,
fundamentally decent.
If you read the book in high school, or
have only seen one of the movies, you
must see Gatz to understand why
Fitzgerald’s work truly is the Great
American Novel.
It’s also hauntingly Irish. Fitzgerald was brought up
Irish Catholic, with a grandparent from the old
country.
He was ambivalent about his Irishness, sometimes
claiming it and other times rejecting it.
He died at 44, of a heart attack brought on by
alcoholism.
If “An Irishman’s heart is nothing but his
imagination,” as George Bernard Shaw wrote, Jay Gatsby
is the quintessential Irishman.
He’s entirely self-invented.
His love for Daisy and his desire to reclaim the past
are also convictions of the imagination, so strong he
almost makes them true.
If Irish love, as Shaw suggests in John Bull’s Other
Island, is based in yearning, again, what could be
more Irish than the yearning of a man who gazes at a
green light across the bay because it’s the light on
the dock of his beloved, who reads a Chicago paper
every day for five years in hopes of seeing his
beloved’s name in it
Here’s Nick on Gatsby’s reunion with Daisy:
“There must have been moments even
that afternoon when Daisy tumbled
short of his dreams – not through
her own fault but because of the
colossal vitality of his illusion.
It had gone beyond her, beyond
everything. He had thrown himself
into it with a creative passion,
adding to it all the time, decking
it out with every bright feather
that drifted his way. No amount of
fire or freshness can challenge
what a man will store up in his
ghostly heart.”
No actor could ever capture the richness of this
observation. It has to be heard.
Hearing it while also seeing it is what makes Gatz so
terrible and so wonderful.
Gatsby’s Irish dreaming here is also
married to the American dream of
success. They mesh badly.
One or the other could gain happiness; together they
are doomed.
It’s Gatsby’s heart that makes us love him.
It’s his heart that inevitably ruins him.
Annie McNamara and Kate Scelsa (Joan Marcus)
Gatsby’s faith in the past is also Irish, his decision
that he could reclaim it by dreaming it fully.
The setting for the play is a tawdry office, with dull
metal furniture, file cabinets, old wood paneling
outside.
As Nick reads aloud to pass the time,
gradually office workers begin entering in to the
story too.
It sounds hokey but is done seamlessly,
and the premise soon ceases to matter at all.
It’s intensely theatrical – there are no period
costumes a la Downton Abbey, though Colleen
Werthmann’s modern dress is suggestive.
Jordan Baker, a socialite whom Nick dates for awhile,
is played by Susie Sokol – a petite girl in a polo
shirt.
Jim Fletcher, Victoria Vazquez and Scott
Shepherd (Joan Marcu
An imposing but balding office manager, Jim Fletcher,
is our handsome Jay Gatsby.
He, like Gatsby, wears a pink suit in the second half.
We don’t even meet Gatsby for the whole of the first
hour.
We hear about him, though, a wealthy man in
West Egg who throws enormous parties. Nick, a young
bondsman and World War I veteran, is a cousin of Daisy
Buchanan, so we do meet Daisy (Victoria Vazquez) and
her rather brutish husband Tom (Gary Wilmes), who was
at Yale with Nick.
We go to New York with Nick and Tom and Tom’s vulgar
but vital mistress Myrtle (Laurena Allan), where 20’s
music plays and as the party gets wilder, people throw
stacks of paper in the air.
Seeing office papers go flying around captures a
debauched bacchanalia perfectly – there’s an
awful shock in it.
For the first half, you’ll notice how funny it always
is to see an actor trying to be what the prose says he
is – haughty, or expectant, etc.
It was funny when
the Neo-Futurists did it in 2011 with “Stage
Directions of Eugene O’Neill,” and it’s amusing here
too.
But that’s just the first half.
You’ll be fully
in the story by the second hour, as will the office
workers turned characters.
The sound design by Ben Williams includes period and
contemporary music as well as effects and invents a
whole word in front of us.
Williams, sitting at a
soundboard onstage, also plays Michaelis, and enters
into the action in other ways from time to time.
John Collins’ direction is fast and precise.
There are a few times the energy flags – a long scene
that begins the second half serves the text, but is
hard on the audience, who have just come from dinner.
But overall the hours fly by.
It’s masterfully done. And you do hear every word,
every insight, every detail. Ross Fletcher has an
incisive scene as Henry C. Gatz, Gatsby’s father, who
shows up for Gatsby’s funeral. He’s found Gatsby’s
schedule, inscribed in an old copy of Hopalong
Cassidy, which included things like “practice
elocution, poise and how to attain it” and “Read one
improving book or magazine per week” and “be better to
parents.”
Even writing it brings a lump to my throat.
Fitzgerald’s compassion for his flawed, ambitious
dreamer, and even for those who trample on those
dreams, has never been so palpable, nor so compelling.
.
GATZ runs through May 13 at the Public Theater, 425
Lafayette St., NYC. 212-967-7555. It is presented as a
marthon theatrical event, with two intermissions and a
dinner break, Wednesdays, Fridays, Saturdays at 3,
Sundays at 2.