The lights turn on as Scott Shepherd, the lead actor in Elevator Repair Service’s “Gatz,” walks on stage as a surly office worker. He frustratedly picks at his computer, which refuses to turn on. It’s a blocky, vintage thing that matches the drab office interior around him, with its share of faded wallpaper, motivational posters and clutter — papers stacked in boxes everywhere. Resigned, Shepherd picks up a copy of “The Great Gatsby” and starts reading: “In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.” And continues reading, verbatim, as the eight-hour show begins.
Yes, the entirety of “The Great Gatsby” is staged word-for-word in its entirety. The director’s note in the playbill notes:
“We knew we were interested in the writing, not just the story, and we quickly found that the elegant efficiency of Fitzgerald’s style was irreparably injured when we tried to edit or condense his words.” Director John Collins wrote, “The prose is so delicately and expertly constructed that even the omission of a single adjective is rhythmically disappointing.”
Shepherd reads on, starting to immerse himself in the character of Nick Carraway. He gives voice to the different characters as they begin to appear in dialogue: a gruff baritone for Tom, a high-pitched falsetto for Daisy. In due time, the other anonymous workers populating the office background cannot bear the drama anymore and suddenly jump in, taking on respective roles. They turn the table and couch of the cluttered office into all sorts of different houses, cars, locations. One imagines the book has enchanted the whole stage.
“Gatz” is a show unconcerned with dramatic transformation, not seeking to reinterpret the novel into a dramatic work, but instead retaining all its fidelity. The frame story, a low-rent office, works surprisingly well for the endeavor. Take this passage from the novel — the crucial half-hour before Daisy marries Tom — for example.
“We gave her spirits of ammonia and put ice on her forehead and hooked her back into her dress, and half an hour later, when we walked out of the room, the pearls were around her neck and the incident was over.”
A less astute drama will have the burden of staging the oblique, literary parts of the book and risk destroying the novel’s delicate balance through the impossible act of translating Fitzgerald’s prose into concrete stage direction. But “Gatz” lets Jordan Baker monologize the whole section with Daisy laying on the couch — cast in the half-light, motionless — allowing the audience’s imagination to fill in the rest. Importantly, the dual roles of each actor, both being a character in the show and an office worker, lets this sort of scene breathe. “Jordan” here is both Jordan Baker dialogically situated in the wedding hall but also Jordan from the office reading the scene; the actors ebb in and out of their character’s layers according to the rhythms of the novel. It’s an unprecedented way to let technique of free indirect style flow through a staged play as we dip from author to narrator to character.
There’s also a bundle of great performances in the play, from Susie Sokol playing a wry Jordan Baker that gives her character a cunning physicality to Tory Vazquez’s simultaneously naive and perturbed Daisy. Still, the pinnacle performance has to be Shepherd, who has the demanding job of narrator, reading the vast majority of the book with the poise of a seasoned voice actor, rarely stumbling even as he plays a convincing Nick Carraway and an endearingly ineffective office worker.
And Gatsby, the ostensibly young, charming, attractive man is played by an old and balding Jim Fletcher. Other renditions of the book reach for a more aesthetically similar casting, like Leonardo DiCaprio or Jeremy Jordan, but Fletcher’s Gatsby is outmoded for a good reason: his rendition is dead as soon as he walks on the stage, entering a set reminiscent of Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman.” Fletcher walks around ghostly not just because every American found out about the novel’s ending in high school, but also because we still live with the cultural malignancies “The Great Gatsby” first diagnosed in America.
The show carries this particular circularity close; the dinner table between Gatsby and Nick is both the car Tom drives back from the site of the accident and Gatsby’s bed as Daisy lies on it, each moment replaying with every recycling of that table. Yet, at the end of the play, the table is still what it always was: a plain table in some drab, dying inner-city office. As Nick Carraway sits down, all traces of the evening’s fantasy fade, with the final words echoing out: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
Daily Arts Writer Darrin Zhou can be reached at darrinz@umich.edu.
