Gatz (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Gatz Sara Jane Bailes Gatz. Written by F. Scott Fitzgerald . Created by Elevator Repair Service, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. 21– 2409 2006. Devised by New York downtown theatre ensemble Elevator Repair Service (ERS), Gatztakes as its premise the delivery of an unabridged verbatim reading of F. Scott Fitzgerald's classic American novel, The Great Gatsby. Over its six-and-a-half-hour staging (on two consecutive nights or in one sitting) the show invites audience members to collude with performers by taking on the task of imagining. We translate (rather than adapt) the novel into and out of the setting of a drab contemporary office witnessing what is effectively a performed reading and a performance that interrogates reading. The show begins in an understated manner. A man (Scott Shepherd) enters, and we hear a drone of industrial noise in the background as he swings the door open and stands poised for a moment in the dark before entering a room cluttered with dilapidated furnishings, brownish walls, and the dull institutional lighting of a lowbrow office. Upstage, a windowed corridor leads to a smaller room in which we later observe scenes within scenes through its glass panes. In habitual manner, the man switches the light on, hangs (practically throws) his coat onto a stand, sits down, and glances at his desk clock (this becomes a recurring and humorous motif), which remains fixed at twenty minutes to ten for the duration of the performance. As the piece continues, this faulty clock takes on significance, reminding us that in reading a novel, the individual seems to suspend his relationship with real time as the temporality of another world floods the imagination. This mixed and suspended temporality applies equally to the audience watching the world of Gatsbyunfold effortlessly in the unlikely setting of this drab office. Dressed in casual work attire the man switches on his computer, which (of course) refuses to start despite his frustrated key-tapping efforts to trick the machine into action. This failure of modern technology allows both Shepherd and his audience to glide effortlessly into the glamorous old-fashioned world of the novel, for at this point he slides open a black Rolodex on his desk and pulls out a well-thumbed copy of The Great Gatsby. Opening the book, intermittently sipping his take-out coffee, he begins quietly and casually to read out loud while trying to boot up the computer. Shepherd instantaneously becomes Nick Carraway, the book's nostalgic narrator, while the role he has already established (distracted, bored office worker) maintains the actor's position as semidetached witness to Nick's narration: he is both inside and outside the novel, and this clever principle sets up one of the conventions that defines the piece, allowing the performers to float between office persona and characters from the book. Nick continues reading aloud until some 182 pages and a quarter of a day later he reaches the novel's end, at which point he closes the book, the lights go out, and the show ends. In that time, some twelve other performers, all part of this mismanaged outfit, join Nick onstage, each going about the mundane business of office life (sorting mail, signing and filing letters, answering telephones, gossiping) as they become increasingly interpolated in the grander tragic fictions that stake out the heart of the novel. Augmented by subtle but exact ambient sound design (Ben Williams with John Collin's assistance) and the boldly eclectic musical score typical of the company's work (including Duke Ellington, Kronos Quartet, and the Afro-Cuban All Stars), The Great Gatsbyis summoned before us by staging humorous and simple solutions to the problem of representation. The show works by galvanizing the audience's too-often neglected capacity to imagine detailed scenarios such as the languid hot summers of Long Island's rich during the Jazz Age: cocktails and all-night parties; affairs and deceptions; flamboyant trips into New York City; and the stark social and emotional poverty, corruption, and violence that encroaches upon the lives of the characters—Gatsby, Daisy, Jordan, Tom Buchanan, Wilson, and so on. It all somehow manages to flit in and...