Review: Gatz Returns for a Last Hurrah at the Public Theater

Theater company Elevator Repair Service has returned to the Public Theater with their arguably most famous production to date, Gatz. Director and artistic director John Collins claims it will be the show’s final run in New York City, and the timing is certainly right for it. At the very least, the six-hour word-for-word stage adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic American novel The Great Gatsby offers a welcome riposte to the glitzy, superficial musical adaptation still holding court on Broadway. And of course, there’s the fact that the novel turns 100 next year. But there are plenty of other reasons to celebrate Gatz‘s return: chief among them, the opportunity to revisit a daring, multifaceted, and thrilling piece of theater.

And “theater” it surely is, because Gatz is no glorified audiobook. Yes, it features an actor (ERS stalwart Scott Shepherd) reading the book aloud as other performers play various characters in the Jazz Age-set story, in which Jay Gatsby (Jim Fletcher) attempts to woo Daisy Buchanan (Tory Vazquez) away from her husband, Tom (Pete Simpson). Shepherd essentially becomes the book’s narrator, Nick Carraway. But Collins and the company have thought out every single line reading, physical movement, and design choice to bring Fitzgerald’s story to the stage. Given the sheer number of choices that have to be made, the mind can’t help but boggle at how effortless, natural, and spontaneous it all feels.

Instead of taking place in period-appropriate settings and attire, though, this Gatsby adaptation takes place in a nondescript office setting (on a set designed by Louisa Thompson) with all the actors dressed in business casual and formal wear (Colleen Werthmann designed the costumes). Beyond Mark Barton’s complex lighting design and sound designer Ben Jalosa Williams’s effects, which he provides onstage with a sound board (while occasionally getting up to perform a supporting role), the performers use available props to evoke actions and settings. In that sense, one could see Gatz as a fête of theater itself, a gleefully inventive tribute to human resourcefulness in putting on a show.

But Elevator Repair Service could have chosen any text with which to demonstrate that. Why The Great Gatsby, and why tackle the complete text instead of just selections from it, as the company has done with Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises and, most recently, James Joyce’s Ulysses? Back when it premiered off-Broadway in 2010, many critics saw in Gatz a surreal celebration of the pleasures of getting lost in a novel, and sure, there’s something to that. After all, the show begins with Shepherd’s anonymous working stiff walking into an office and struggling with a computer before he comes upon a copy of Gatsby in an empty Rolodex. And Fitzgerald’s Roaring Twenties fantasy and humdrum reality blur freely throughout, with performers seen taking phone calls, fixing printers, sorting mail, and other such tasks while also inhabiting characters. The visual effect is like seeing the novel come to life around Shepherd, the way it would in the mind of any reader.

But that’s a thin, overly insular peg on which to hang an entire six-hour marathon (eight when you include two intermissions and a dinner break). A more enduring aspect of this show is its concept of having Fitzgerald’s tale of the idle rich being enacted by members of the working class, thereby suggesting the story’s timelessness and universality. Similar to the way James Gatz clawed his way out of his poor midwestern beginnings to remake himself as party-throwing millionaire Jay Gatsby, so can a lowly grunt build up his own richly detailed mental universe. Gatz’s effortful rise up the social ladder finds an analogue in the uphill climb that comes with hearing every word of the novel spoken. That’s part of the creative struggle that makes the catharsis of its darkly profound final line worthwhile.

Such a catharsis wouldn’t be possible without a game cast. Fletcher brings reserves of dignity and yearning as Jay Gatsby, with Simpson offering at times terrifying brutishness as romantic rival Tom and Vazquez becoming appropriately opaque yet appealing as Daisy. Of the supporting performers, Susie Sokol stands out as Jordan Baker, the smirking amateur golf champion with a penchant for fibbing; as does Laurena Allan as the more emotionally open and ultimately tragic Myrtle Wilson, one of Tom’s mistresses. But it’s Shepherd who holds it all together, from his deliberately monotone opening moments to the final chapter, which he largely recites from memory. The sense of simultaneous relief and satisfaction you’ll feel at the end of this theatrical endurance test is very much worth experiencing live, whether for the first time or all over again.