The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s masterpiece, was published April 10, 1925, just months short of 100 years ago. It’s unlikely that Public Theater artistic director Oscar Eustis, who first produced the piece in 2010, didn’t have the momentous occasion in mind when he decided to revive The Elevator Repair Service’s Gatz, another widely acknowledged masterpiece.
Many lovers of American literature maintain Fitzgerald’s Jazz Age novel (“Jazz Age” is Fitzgerald’s term) is a work from which not a single word can be added nor a single word deleted. I agree—well, almost agree, since in the novel Princeton drop-out Fitzgerald refers to Yale’s Daily News, when it’s, correctly, Yale Daily News.
But quibbling is uncalled for, because ERS has such unadulterated reverence for Fitzgerald’s every word, right down to the last, breath-taking 14—“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” Director Collins doesn’t eliminate even one nor does he have the affrontery to insert one.
[Read Michael Sommers’ ★★★★★ review here.]
How, under Collins, does this voluptuous madness unfold? A man (Scott Shepherd) enters Louisa Thompson’s depiction of an office cleverly designed to be nondescript. He hangs his raincoat on a hook, as he obviously does everyday, and sits at a computer he discovers isn’t operating. He futzes with it for a short while, gives up, and opens a nearby box from which he retrieves a paperback Great Gatsby. He starts reading aloud to himself.
Before long co-workers arrive, initially going about their business but slowly becoming caught up not only in Shepherd’s unexpected activity but increasingly turning into Fitzgerald’s unforgettable characters. They’re many of the Jazz Age privileged, who are eventually revealed as tormented by an inability to realize the American dream.
Soon enough, the fellow reading morphs into Fitzgerald’s Midwest transplant and current West Egg, Long Island resident Nick Carraway, now narrating the elaborate tale. Recalling his father’s advice that he mustn’t judge others whose histories he doesn’t know, Nick begins the tale of seemingly suave moneybags and fabulous party-giver Jay Gatsby (Jim Fletcher), pampered Southern belle Daisy Buchanan (Tory Vasquez), her blunt horse-owning husband Tom Buchanan (Peter Simpson), Daisy’s hard-edged golfer friend Jordan Baker (Susie Sokol), Tom’s dissatisfied mistress Myrtle (Laurena Allan), and her woeful mechanic husband George (Frank Boyd).
Nick was at Yale with Tom as well as being Daisy’s cousin, not that he knows her well. She’s from the kind of money just above his not-deprived background. Nevertheless, Nick turns out to be the very person to bring Jay and Daisy together. He’s handy for Jay Gatsby, who’s moved into his West Egg mansion precisely because he can look across the bay at the multi-acre Buchanan East Egg estate with its (extremely symbolic) green dock light flickering his way with such temptation.
No need to go into how this active, disturbed, eventually beset crowd is tied together in increasingly threatening knots. Die-hard fans have long known the extravagant plot. Newcomers have the Fitzgerald thrills and chills to look forward to. And isn’t being read aloud to a wonderful way to “read” a novel?
Presented over eight hours with two intermissions and a dinner break, Gatz in its inspired conception and result is just about perfect. Yes, it takes eight hours but is so enthralling it seems to go by in a snap. The cast members, mostly delivering Fitzgerald’s dialogue—Sokol reads a small portion—are adept at taking on their roles while sporadically continuing to perform office duties.
Shepherd reads well, while reflecting Nick’s reactions to the disillusioning developments between Tom and Daisy and among Tom, Myrtle, and pathetic George. For Fitzgerald’s final pages, Shepherd puts the book aside and recites with such relaxed effect that he all but has spectators breathless. A performance of such unforced sheen may not appear elsewhere in Manhattan right now.
Sokol’s Jordan, who spends time perusing Golf magazine and then swinging an imaginary club, is crisply authoritative throughout. Fletcher’s Jay Gatsby, wearing the pink suit the arriviste affects (Colleen Werthmann, the costumer), catches the man’s enigmatic aura. (Perhaps he might have made more of the often-repeated words “old sport,” a phrase Gatsby possibly picked up during his few weeks at Oxford under the World War I’s G. I. Bill equivalent.)
Pete Simpson makes the oily best of Tom’s self-satisfied, racist bully. Boyd is a woefully depressed George. As Gatsby’s aggrieved father, Henry C. Gatz, Ross Fletcher, bent and using an umbrella as a cane, instills an old man’s dignity in a father unsure of what his son attained but nonetheless gratefully proud.
There are, unfortunately, two lapses in all this near perfection. Vazquez, tall with long black hair flowing, is somehow more Bryn Mawr elegant than Southern belle raised to radiate careless charm. Little of Fitzgerald’s intentions emerge, which doesn’t enrich the moments when she and Gatsby rekindle—or attempt to rekindle—their romance. As Myrtle, Allan is non-stop-flighty, not at all blatantly sexy in the way randy Tom apparently likes the women with whom he extramaritally dallies.
The true magnificence of this approach to a stage adaptation is its scrupulous inclusion of the full text. Standard stage adaptations eliminate most of an author’s descriptive prose. This one doesn’t, honoring Fitzgerald’s irresistible powers. For only one instance of innumerable heart-throbbing instances he writes: “Gatsby indicated a gorgeous orchid of a woman who sat in state under a white-palm tree.” Eternal thanks, ERS.
Gatz opened November 8, 2024, at the Public Theater and runs through December 1. Tickets and information: publictheater.org
