I first heard about GATZ about 5 or 6 years ago from my friend Mark Barton, a lighting designer. He started telling me about this wacky performance piece he was working on involving a cover to cover reading of The Great Gatsby set in an office building. Over the years the reputation of this show grew as did my excitement to eventually be in the same town it was playing. This past weekend I saw it in New York. It is rare that I go to the theater and leave feeling as though I have witnessed a true work of art. GATZ is a work of art.
Before I go on praising the piece, which I could easily do, I must make one thing clear. I do not like the book. Walking in to the play I thought I did, but I soon began to take stock of it and realized I had not read Gatsby since my freshman english class in high school. What I liked, was the idea of the book. The idea of a fast paced 1920s filled with glamorous parties and wild characters. As the book was read I found myself at once engrossed by the performance and unmoved by the book.
The Great Gatsby is fine, but I think there is a reason it remains required reading for high school freshman english class and no more. It is just not that sophisticated. The language is at times intriguing and the fast paced world of not insignificant interest. But the book, the ideas, the emotions, and the characters themselves, is rather slight. There are no big original ideas in the book other than New York is a big fast moving city and the brutality of the very rich is unpleasant to be around, which are not very big nor original.
The emotions too are quite thin. Gatsby, who has constructed his false identity in order to recapture a love which never quite existed, has little emotional faculty. Before he can come to awareness that he is more enamored of the idea of the woman he loves than the woman herself, he is killed and the book quickly draws to a close.
I have heard GATZ described as a “love affair with a book” or some similar turn of phrase. This reading of the show sounds more like someone who likes the book and did not step back to reassess. The characters in Gatsby are thin, vacuous, and unpleasant. The bleak grey office in which the play happens only calls attention to this fact. The two dimensionality of the book is heightened by the complexity of what is happening on stage.
The acting is amazing. Some of the best I have seen in a long time. But it is the direction which truly sets this work apart from most other stage work. As the play progresses over 7+ hours we weave in and out of the consciousness of the reader and his external environment. The other people in the office blend effortlessly from coworker in the background to character leaping off the page. The almost accidental resonance with the movement of the office is kept in a decidedly unpredictable rhythm. At any moment a movement, noise, or prop could have deep symbolic resonance with the book. But then it might just be someone walking across the stage.
In keeping the rules of the device fluid, the direction is able to maintain a tension and excitement for the full course of the book. The interesting story happening on stage is not the book. It is not the narrative events put down on paper by F. Scott Fitzgerald. The story being told, the one worth paying attention to, is of the experience of consciousness of a reader. The interplay between fact and fiction, between the imagination and external reality, is what keeps the audience engaged for so long.
Eight and a half hours (including a dinner break and two intermissions) is a long time to sit in deeply uncomfortable chairs while being intermittently kicked by the oblivious patron behind you. Yet were it not for my very sore rear end I would hardly have noticed. The directorial precision was phenomenal.
No less brilliant was the design. From scenery, to costumes, to sound, to lighting, every element found that perfect blend of bland naturalism and sophisticated theatricality. The set, while firmly locating us in a dreary office, did not miss any opportunities for theatricality. Shelves, piled high with boxes (labeled “taxes 1919-1923″ or “Research, small towns”), made for wings on either side of the stage. My favorite detail was a square space on the upstage wall just right of center, an unfaded bit of wall where the ghost of a poster or picture stood, slowly fading back into the wall.
The sound designer, ever present on stage, performed a digital orchestra of urban background noise, exaggerated golf ball swings, and jazz. Not only was the designed sound perfect, but the quality of sound throughout the piece was an utter delight. From crashes of trays, to flying papers, to Nick’s voice underscored by ballroom dance music, the sonic texture of the piece held this delicate world together.
The lighting morphed, almost imperceptibly, from blank sterile office florescent to theatricalized late afternoon sun. The use of a wall sconce as sun and moon and office light was varied with the same unpredictable rhythm as the rest of the piece. Subtile, and sometimes dramatic, shifts in the quality of light made for a wonderful visual experience.
Every aspect of this production was designed and rehearsed to perfection. And through all this was the book. A bit dated, and feeling, much like the characters in the novel itself, hyped and surrounded by a glamour that does not befit its reality. Gatsby is just a small town boy from the midwest, with no real friends, and no lasting legacy, diminished to nothing as the revelers leave his home. Gatsby too is a small book, which fills a 14 year old’s heart with the excitement of days gone by, but which, when exposed to the cold light of clear critique, does not have much more than reputation to hold it up. GATZ stands tall and powerful, a work worthy of international praise and a strong and enthusiastic following.
