By Victoria Looseleaf
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s masterpiece, The Great Gatsby, spawned five films, including a 1926 silent movie of a stage adaptation, a 1949 Alan Ladd-starring vehicle and a 2002 hip-hop treatise called G in which Jay Gatsby is rendered as a P. Diddy-like mogul. And next spring, Leo DiCaprio fans will be treated to a sixth flick, Baz Luhrmann’s headache-inducing interpretation of what has been called the greatest American novel of the 20th century. There was also a bad-to-middling TV version with Paul Rudd as Nick Carraway, and ooh, let us not forget John Harbison’s 1999 opera. (We did: After seeing it at the Met, where we were, sadly, underwhelmed, all remnants of Daisy, Tom, Myrtle and the mysterious Gatsby flitted from our brains like so much West Egg flotsam).
There’s also a Korean Web Comic, The Great Catsby. And who knows – perhaps the K-pop scene that spawned Psy’s Gangnam Style will soon release Gatsby Style.
But here’s where all comparisons end: Stop whatever you’re doing and get thee to REDCAT, where a virtuosic staged marathon “reading” is being played out through December 9. Dubbed Gatz, this is the mother of all marathons, including binge-viewings of Homeland, Boardwalk Empire and Downton Abbey, in which Fitzgerald’s classic Jazz Age novel, written in 1925, is “performed” in its entirety (we’re talking word for word, dear readers), by the astonishing Elevator Repair Service. The New York-based theater troupe has also tackled Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury and Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. (We tried to catch the latter last summer in Amsterdam, but, alas, it wasn’t meant to be.)
Gatz, however, was. And if you’ve got six hours (not counting two intermissions and a dinner break – a colleague and I hopped on Angels Flight and managed to get tacos and tempura at Grand Central Market minutes before it closed), this is the show to see, one that will sear itself onto your cultural consciousness, inspire you with the magic of all manner of descriptors (fraternal hilarity, anyone?), and take you on a journey that is so desperately needed these days you’ll leave delirious…and, if you can believe, wanting more. Gatz, dare we say, is a theatrical marvel right up there with Tony Kushner’s Angels in America.
Devoid of period sets or costumes (indeed, Louisa Thompson’s shabby business-office rendering becomes a place for reveries, revelries and recriminations, albeit in a Hopperesque way), Gatz sucks you in from its opening words: “In my younger and more vulnerable years …” As read by the magnificent Scott Shepherd – and not in an actorly fashion, that would be too predictable, but in a flat, monotonous voice – Shepherd (a homespun Damian Lewis, our hero, btw), literally, is Nick Carraway, the brutally honest narrator of the novel. (“There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired.”) Honestly, it doesn’t get much better than this.
As bored office workers trickle in and out – and also embody those Fitzgerald folks we know so well, we get to spend quality time with Gatsby (a fabulous Jim Fletcher, whose ‘Old Sport’ moniker seem to make more sense than Robert Redford’s did in the 1974 version, though when we recently saw the Jack Clayton-directed flick again, this time on an Airbus to France, we were kind of digging it – or perhaps it was the wine and the notion of another European sojourn that helped re-illuminate that film’s Fitzgeraldian essence).
In any case: Other thespians of note populating the REDCAT space include Victoria Vazquez’ Daisy Buchanan (“They’re such beautiful shirts,” she sobbed, her voice muffled in the thick folds. “It makes me sad because I’ve never seen such – such beautiful shirts before.”) Then there’s her crass, wealthy hubby, Robert Cucuzza’s Tom, who blusters about spewing prophetic hubris (“If we don’t look out the white race will be – will be utterly submerged”), while Frank Boyd’s sad sack of a husband to Laurena Allan’s doomed Myrtle, also bring a pure pulsing heart to the stage. In fact, you find yourself so submerged in the glorious words of the text, that you’re not so much hearing Shepherd’s colossal anti-speechifying (“Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope.”), as living them.
How can this be? Also credit John Collins’ brilliant direction, Ben Williams’ stunning sound design and Mark Barton’s lighting, with the cast of 13 a mostly cohesive bunch. (We didn’t much care for Susie Sokol’s Jordan, whose antics were too, er, antic-y.) Boisterous party scenes butt up against quiet, spare moments, with the words, always the words, rhythmically flowing. Capturing the pathetic drudgery of Myrtle’s existence as well as Long Island’s swanky one-percenters – and everything, it seems, in-between – this stunning realization, made even more so with Shepherd as our guide (no pun intended), is nothing less than a well-oiled machine, beautifully thrumming, humming and ultimately revealing itself…when we, in the eighth hour, hear Fitzgerald’s sublimely final words: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
Humanity, rise up!
Top photo (from left): Scott Shepherd (also in reclining photo), Joe Fletcher, Victoria Vazquez, by Steven Gunther
