I’ll admit, I was worried about spending 6 hours in a theater for the production of The Gatz, now playing at the American Repertory Theater. What if I get gassy, have to go pee, or the person next to me has massive armchair-love-handles and garlic breath and insists on sighing regularly. Well, I anted up and dropped over a hundred bucks to sit front row. It would be a journey, a word for word reading of The Great Gatsby, by you know, that writer you heard about in high school but never read, F. Scott Fitzgerald. Being the slow reader I am with a busy schedule of wasting time in various sophisticated ways, reading/experiencing The Great Gatsby in 6 hours for a hundred bucks was a steal!

And there, in the tension of the forward slash between reading and experiencing, resides the beautiful and mysterious crux of The Gatz: the way in which it straddles mediums. With no other word uttered than every single word written in the novel, it’s in part a reading. But it’s a reading that happens, that becomes, that is experienced, part in flesh and part in mind. Yes, it is theater and the words are brought to life. But the expanse of this well known classic novel almost topples any attempt of an actor and a stage; it becomes a production that takes place more in our minds than within the theater. And the genius is that The Gatz gets this; it doesn’t try to play the novel, it lets the novel do the playing. And play it does.

The stage setting is an old scrappy office, really just a source of props fit for everywhere the novel will take them. The actors appear like everyday office folk until they come under the spell of the book. The narrator/protagonist/Nick Carraway begins reading The Great Gatsby aloud in the office. All the rhythm of the words swirl around the theater and start to push and pull the actors into and through the drama of the story. The actors exaggerate the novel’s characters as if self-conscious puppets. The narrator is the puppeteer. And the puppeteer is being puppeted himself by F. Scott Fitzgerald. The actors begin to flirt with the text, mocking and mirroring the almost dualing mediums of theater and literature, until the drama of the story totally consumes them and they become the characters of The Great Gatsby.

While the action drives the plot forward and the actors and settings shift on stage, an audience of 500 some minds meditate on the rich language and deep interiority of Nick’s narration; there’s a sustained palpable wave of wonder and awe flowing throughout the audience from passage to passage. It’s a deeply communal, monkish experience.

“But his heart was in a constant, turbulent riot. The most grotesque and fantastic conceits haunted him in his bed at night. A universe of ineffable gaudiness spun itself out in his brain while the clock ticked on the wash-stand and the moon soaked with wet light his tangled clothes upon the floor. Each night he added to the pattern of his fancies until drowsiness closed down upon some vivid scene with an oblivious embrace. For a while these reveries provided an outlet for his imagination; they were a satisfactory hint of the unreality of reality, a promise that the rock of the world was founded securely on a fairy’s wing.”

The Gatz is ripe with humor too, if not directly from the text it sparks as the cast exaggerates the tall orders of action and descriptive prose:

“I glanced at Daisy, who was staring terrified between Gatsby and her husband, and at Jordan, who had begun to balance an invisible but absorbing object on the tip of her chin.”

To illuminate this moment, Jordan reaches her chin high and shifts like a magician balancing a bowling pin on her chin. The actors masterfully and hilariously bring Fitzgerald’s literary fireworks to life.

And then those Fitzgeraldian moments of insight that send your head spinning:

“Dishonesty in a woman is a thing you never blame deeply…”

Awww, that’s sweet. But I don’t think our last couple presidential candidates would agree. Perhaps he means you don’t blame a woman for dishonesty because you can’t; as if you can’t blame someone for being less dishonest than yourself, and a man’s a mountain of dishonesty right? I’ll buy that for a dollar and sell it back to you for twenty.

Oh, the impenetrable desires and strife of the Gatz in us all:

“No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.”

If you haven’t read it yourself, I say go see it first. It’s rare you can say that.

The Gatz is produced by the theater company, Elevator Repair Service, who spent a decade trying to get the legal rights to use Fitzgerald’s text. Ten years was certainly worth the 6 hour experience. Big thanks ERS for keeping with their vision. I will say though, I did get a little gassy (!), luckily it was towards the end. Perhaps the playbill ought to have the disclaimer: flatulence and face masks allowed and encouraged for uninterrupted enjoyment of the show.

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