Understatement and Awe
By Jonathan Kalb
Gatz
By Elevator Repair Service
The Public Theater
425 Lafayette St.
Box office: 212-539-8500
Gatz is a work of quiet and sustained
brilliance--a surprisingly soulful feat of artistic understatement that
happens to be is seven hours long. It's also the most probing and resonant
piece the experimental company Elevator Repair Service has done to date.
A nondescript office dogsbody, played by Scott
Shepherd, arrives one morning at his manifestly dead-end job, can't
get his computer booted, and picks up a well-thumbed paperback of F.
Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. He begins reading aloud,
badly, gradually improves, and then slowly grows interested and skillfully
animated. At some point impossible to pinpoint, this man's equally nondescript
co-workers stop giving him funny looks and instead begin pitching in
to help enact and narrate the story--which is to say, the whole
story, including every one of its 47,000 words. These co-workers begin
to take on specific qualities, but none ever ceases to be an office
drone. Their enactments remain rough and unpretentious, their impersonations
always approximate and incomplete, and that pervasive quality of DIY
humility turns out to be crucial to the production's intense emotional
punch.
On one level, Gatz is a tribute to the
pleasure of reading--a blessedly unfashionable cause in this age of
epidemic attention-deficit and mass isolation behind flickering screens.
Yet countless earnest avant-gardists have tried and failed before to
translate into stage terms their pleasure in reading nondramatic texts
(usually difficult ones). ERS, impressively, has found a rare formula
that works theatrically. The gambit of Gatz succeeds because
of its amusing and interesting narrative technique (of which more in
a moment) and also because of its choice of material. Gatsby
is not a difficult book, so one can listen to it with relative ease.
More important, its central theme is the dream of American self-invention,
that perennial, optimistic conviction we New Worlders harbor that, with
a little pluck and luck, we can do anything, become anything, because
we're liberated from the shackles of rank and class-prejudice that doomed
our European predecessors to gloom and stasis. Of course, Fitzgerald
saw the holes in that notion, recognized the rigid lines of reinvented
privilege and class that arose in the great new democracy. That's the
main agon in his book, no less pertinent today than when it appeared
in 1925.
ERS's key perception was that that agon, and
the dream animating it, are still ferociously active in the American
imagination. Millions of bored office workers still go to work every
day in the info age certain they're better than what they do and fantasize
about becoming self-made tycoons like Jay Gatsby, or elegant heiresses
like Daisy Buchanan. It's the way Gatz exploits that living
reality--the office-worker-as-dreamer turned office-worker-as-actor,
with a gentle push--that makes it so touching. There's a huge lode of
frustrated emotion beneath the office circumstance that the show cleverly
taps. (And I might add that it was the absence of such a lode, due to
the absence of such a clear correspondence between the fictional and
real worlds, that made ERS's 2008 staging of Faulkner's The Sound
and the Fury so much less powerful.)
Louisa Thompson's grimy and cluttered office
set, conveniently supplied with a flexible sofa and a big hallway window
upstage, is the ideal neutral screen for Gatz's play of projected
fantasies and frustrations. With only tiny adjustments, accomplished
in seconds by the actors, the space easily morphs in our minds into
a mansion, a seedy apartment, a greasy garage, and much more, with the
window providing splendidly droll fishbowl effects. The ERS cast members,
moreover, command a similar swift and efficient transformative fluidity,
because they too are marvelously neutral screens onto which we can freely
project all the personalities and images suggested by Fitzgerald's seductively
matter-of-fact words.
Interestingly, if the cast were any more exact
or elaborate in their enactments, they would be ridiculous or dull.
It's because they convince us that they are run-of-the-mill, distracted
dreamers, like us, that they are moving. One New York reviewer expressed
disappointment--incomprehensible to me--in the actor Jim Fletcher's
portrayal of Gatsby. "Who, ultimately, could satisfyingly incarnate
Gatsby, in any literal way?" said the critic. "Robert Redford sure couldn't
in the 1974 film version." But that's exactly the point. In the theater,
bless its humble soul, there can be other priorities than realistic
incarnation, and for years Fletcher's usefulness to avant-garde theater
groups like ERS, the New York City Players, and Forced Entertainment
has been that he is an ideal cipher. Tall, bald, deep-voiced, slow-tongued,
relentlessly deadpan, he projects enormous strength and vigor along
with a hilariously strange and unflappable vagueness and centerlessless.
Just like Gatsby.
Gatz is an extraordinary creation, not
to be missed. Yes, it is long, but as with all exceptional works of
marathon theater, its hours pass in exhilaration and awe.