The mere thought of tasting the above item produces responses of "Ewww," "Blech," and "Ugh, gross!" from many people. But my reaction was markedly different. I instantly realized that I would probably like such a treat if it had been made with half sour pickles instead of dills. I'm sure that's partly due to the fact that, when I was a teenager, a major treat was to drink some of the garlicky pickle juice from a jar of half sours.
Every now and then I find myself sitting through a theatrical production which has been overhyped, overdirected, or just rubs me the wrong way. As we careen toward the 2020 presidential election, it's becoming painfully obvious that we're living in a society where one man's fact is another man's fiction.
- Although millions love Andrew Lloyd Webber's 1981 musical, Cats, the first time I saw the show (from standing room in the Winter Garden Theatre) I was so appalled that I felt as if I deserved a refund.
- After I saw Wicked during its June 2003 out-of-town tryout in San Francisco, I told a friend that I had exited the Curran Theatre whistling the lighting cues.
- Although I'm hardly a purist (and have enjoyed numerous operatic productions that have been updated to a different era or relocated to a different setting), a particularly loathsome production of Gilbert & Sullivan's 1879 operetta, The Pirates of Penzance, struck me as having been aimed squarely at audiences with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).
- I currently belong to a small minority of theatregoers who were severely underwhelmed by Hamilton.
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| A scene from the Elevator Repair Service's production of GATZ (Photo by: Mark Barton) |
In a conversation between playwrights Edward Albee and Will Eno, Albee once stressed that: "A play is a heard-and-seen experience. If you read a play, you hear it. But if you read a novel, you don't hear the dialogue. You read the dialogue, but you don't hear it." As GATZ's director, John Collins, recalls in his program note:
"In one of comedian Andy Kaufman’s more infamous bits, he would take the stage at a comedy club and, sporting a smoking jacket and a cartoonish upper-class accent, begin reading The Great Gatsby. He threatened to read the whole book, cover to cover, and it provoked both disbelief and fury in his audiences. Kaufman clearly aimed to provoke his comedy club fans with an outlandish stunt. We saw a more intriguing possibility -- and suspected a different version of this stunt might actually make powerful theater."
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| Cover art for The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fizgerald |
"In 2003, I met informally with Scott Shepherd (who plays Nick) and another actor in a cramped office above a small theater. Working in that space is what gave us the idea that eventually became the frame story for GATZ: an employee in a grungy office reading the book out loud at his desk. By the spring of 2004 more actors had joined the effort and, over the course of several weeks of workshops, we created staging for the first half of the book. We were starting to understand the longer rhythms that would become fundamental to the event we hoped to create, with the imaginative focus sometimes plunging completely into Fitzgerald’s story, and then resurfacing into the more mundane reality of the low-rent office."
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| Scott Shepherd reads from The Great Gatsby in a scene from GATZ (Photo courtesy of Elevator Repair Service) |
Following its May 2006 premiere in Brussels and its American premiere in Minneapolis, GATZ traveled to nearly 30 cities in the United States and around the globe. After its 2010 New York premiere at the Public Theatre, the production opened in London's West End in 2011.
As GATZ begins, an office worker (Scott Shepherd) arrives at work, sits down at his desk, and attempts to start his computer. Those members of the audience who could clearly see the monitor's screen enjoyed a good laugh at the sight of MS-DOS text scrolling up during the boot sequence and then stubbornly refusing to continue. Numerous reboots prove futile as the employee discovers a copy of The Great Gatsby hidden in his Rolodex and begins to read aloud from Fitzgerald's novel. As other employees arrive at work and begin to silently enact the frustrations of their office routine, they slowly become shapeshifters who can step in and out of the characters from The Great Gatsby as Shepherd assumes the voice of the novel's narrator, Nick Carraway.
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| Scott Shepherd reads from The Great Gatsby in a scene from GATZ (Photo courtesy of Elevator Repair Service) |
Unfortunately, ERS's heavy reliance on manufactured stage business for the office workers when the text is merely narrative (and pantomime when Fitzgerald's characters are not speaking) became quite tedious about 50 minutes into the experience. By the end of an excruciating slog through GATZ's two-hour-long first act, I was bored to tears. Like several others in the audience, I considered bailing on the experience and going home. Nevertheless, I persisted. Having learned on numerous occasions that the first half of a production can be top-heavy with exposition while the second half eventually brings the throbbing meat of the drama to a sizzle, I returned to the theatre following the dinner break.
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| Jim Fletcher portrays Jay Gatsby in a scene from GATZ (Photo by Steven Gunther) |
“Gatz has been a lesson in patience, persistence, and drive," explains Collins. "The idea to perform every word of the book came to us early in the process. We knew we were interested in the writing (not just the story) and quickly found that the elegant efficiency of Fitzgerald’s style was compromised when we tried to edit or condense his words. The prose is so delicately and expertly constructed that even the omission of a single adjective is rhythmically disappointing. When editing The Great Gatsby started to feel problematic, one simple, obvious, and thrillingly challenging idea occurred to us: do the whole thing. Treat the novel as a novel and don’t try to make it into a play. And so we set about devising ways to make the novel work on stage in its entirety, keeping every ‘he said’ and ‘she said.’ Here was an enticing “impossible” task to work on and an inspiring non-theatrical text. The absurdity of the idea was not lost on us. There were certainly times of intense frustration along the way, but in the end I wouldn’t have it happen any differently. I am still discovering new evidence of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s genius.”
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| Scott Shepherd in a scene from GATZ (Photo by: Ian Douglas) |
Some novelists opt to structure their chapters so that readers can see a situation unfolding through the eyes of different characters. Others may choose to construct a novel in an epistolary format. When one thinks about more traditional "he said, she said" narratives, the first things that come to mind are (a) couples counseling, (b) domestic squabbles, or (c) a police procedural.
In the case of GATZ, the "he said, she said" format is a dramatic gimmick that sputters to an early death. For those who don't worship Fitzgerald like a literary god, 5-1/2 hours of its use (with the narrator often walking around the stage and sometimes not even facing the audience) can become a crashing bore. This became acutely evident in the last 30 minutes of ERS's six-hour marathon when Scott Shepherd sat down at a simple desk, faced out into the audience, and recited some of Fitzgerald's most beautiful text with no visual distractions. That part of the experience delivered the kind of exquisite poignancy and admiration for a great wordsmith that had been sorely missing from so much of the performance.
In prolonged dramas that are stretched over a matinee and evening performance (The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby, Angels in America, The Inheritance) an audience needs to feel a sufficient emotional investment in what's happening onstage in order to care about the characters and their stories. In Richard Wagner's 19-hour Ring of the Nibelungen (which is spread over four performances) there are obvious structural reasons for Wotan's monologue in Act II of Die Walkure and the prologue to Gotterdammerung (during which three Norns revisit the entire plot of the Norse saga.) Without Supertitles, it's easy for a person to close one's eyes and just listen to the music.
To my mind, part of the problem with this production of GATZ is due to how people experience a narrative when they read it by themselves (as opposed to when it has been interpreted for them onstage or in film -- where casting, costuming, lighting and set design help to conjure up visions that would otherwise be created by the reader's imagination). Those who attend readings of new plays or performances by such groups as San Francisco's Word For Word know how stimulating the process can be.
Though I was quite impressed by Scott Shepherd's performance as Nick, the other members of the ERS ensemble -- Laurena Allan as Myrtle Wilson, Frank Boyd as George Wilson, Jim Fletcher as Jay Gatsby, Ross Fletcher as Henry C. Gatz, Lindsay Hockaday as Catherine, Maggie Hoffman as Lucille McKee, Robert M. Johanson as Tom Buchanan, Vin Knight as Chester McKee, Annie McNamara as Daisy Buchanan, Gavin Price as Ewing, Susie Sokol as Jordan Baker, and Ben Jalosa Williams as Michaelis -- were supporting players at best, and a director's pawns as the office workers.
With a unit set designed by Louisa Thompson, costumes by Colleen Werthmann, and lighting by Mark Barton, the experience left me surprisingly underwhelmed. But as the old saying goes: "Opinions are like assholes, everybody's got one."
Performances of GATZ continue through March 1 at Berkeley Repertory Theatre (click here for tickets).
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