The Great Gatsby as an eight-hour marathon–what could be more delicious? This gorgeous book offers a provocative commentary on our very ambivalent relationship to the dazzle of privilege and wealth. The London Literary Salon will offer a one-day Salon Intensive study of this Modernist classic in June…contact me now if you are interested.
On paper it looks like punishment: an eight-hour stage production (albeit with a dinner break) during which the entirety of a novel (albeit The Great Gatsby) is read aloud and the scene shifts, inexplicably, between a 1980s office setting and the jazz era of the original. I go to see Gatz at a theatre in downtown Manhattan, as you might visit a disagreeable relative: expecting discomfort and boredom, but feeling virtuous for making the effort. As the lights go down, virtue gives way to dread.
The idea for the show came to John Collins 10 or so years ago. He is the founding member of the Elevator Repair Service, an experimental theatre company devoted to making unusual work out of what he calls “non-dramatic source material. To take something from one medium and make it work in our medium.” At the time, Collins was thinking about creating a puppet show “by finding random objects and sticking eyes on them”. Another member of the company happened to be rereading his favourite novel, The Great Gatsby, and, since Collins likes to use whatever is to hand, they started messing around with ideas. Doing a straightforward adaptation was one notion, but then Collins had a brainwave: why not focus on the very thing that most productions would try to disguise: the medium. “We could try to smooth over it by adapting it into a play. Or we could hit that problem head on and try to stage it as a novel. That was exciting.”
I mention all this as further evidence of just how unpromising a proposition Gatz is. Once the idea to present it as a novel was in place, Collins and Scott Shepherd, who plays the lead and is hoarse when I speak to him from yet another marathon performance, started rehearsing in the only space available to them, a roughed-up office above a theatre. Something about the setting made sense. And so, bit by bit, a scenario evolved: of a bored office worker, finding the novel in a filing cabinet and getting slowly, inexorably sucked into it over the course of a single working day. The audience watches in real time as he reads it aloud and various colleagues come over, take the book from him and assume characters in the play, switching back and forth between realities. It is an insane idea. It militates against every commercial principle in the book. It is also, as I discovered when I first saw the show in 2010, heart-stoppingly brilliant.
The trepidation of the audience in the first 20 minutes is something everyone in the company is aware of. Collins thinks it actually plays in their favour. Low expectations make the slow realisation that it isn’t going to be awful much more powerful. Somewhere around the first hour, as Shepherd’s narration gathers pace, you can feel a collective sigh move through the room, and from there on in it’s electrifying. His is an extraordinary performance. Such are the physical and mental demands of the role, that the only way he can approach it, Shepherd says, is like a regular day at work. After all, it is set in an office. He cannot process Gatz as a single entity. It is more like performance art than acting.
“The show is so big you can’t keep it all in your mind. When I go out at the beginning, I’m not thinking about the end or even chapter two. It’s like not looking down from a high ledge. If I start to think of the hours that are ahead, I get overwhelmed.
The original idea was, let’s see what happens if we just start reading a book and don’t stop. I hang on to that idea so that I don’t feel I’m going out there to present, so much as to have another encounter with this book and try to be as open to new meanings in it as possible.”
For the last 10 years, the show has been performed on and off at theatres and festivals around the country, and several generations have moved through the cast. Kate Scelsa is one of the original members, and she has a weird time sitting for long stretches on stage without anything to do. She plays a secretary, who assumes various roles, enlivening the scenes with heavy dialogue. A recent graduate, she was an intern when Collins first conceived of the show and, since she answered the phones in real life, he said why not try it on stage? She is subtly hilarious in her cubicle, but what is she actually doing in there the rest of the time, while the action unfolds around her?
Editing her novel, it turns out. “You have to have a strategy,” she says. “For Scott [Shepherd] it’s one thing, a crazy endurance test, and I don’t know how he does it. The rest of us have to have another project going on that has our attention.” You simply can’t keep up the adrenaline and treat it like a regular performance, she says. And so, during the off-hours backstage, while one actor practises the piano and another looks after her young baby, Scelsa edits her novel for young adults – the difference being that she can also do this on stage. “I feel like my character would be the person in the office who spends time on her laptop doing something else. You can only see me from the shoulders up in my cubicle; so I’m editing my book.” (It’s called Fans of the Impossible Life; she is looking for a publisher). After seven years of performing the show, the rhythm is so ingrained that Scelsa never misses a cue.
Shepherd, meanwhile, has Gatsby almost entirely by memory. The rest of the cast sometimes challenge him in a game called Test the Freak, where they read out three words at random and see if he can continue. This was put more scarily to the test on stage, says Shepherd, when the book fell apart in his hands one evening. “We’ve only used two books for this show. One book became so deformed it was held together with duct tape. We had a superstitious attachment to it – the Book – and finally it turned into a taped-together sheaf of papers. Then we had a new book and that started to fall apart. One day, a chunk of chapters went flying out and slammed against the back wall. Fortunately, it was part of the book I’d already read. When they taped it back in, they taped it one page off. The next day I was reading, turned the page and there was a page missing. I had to rely on memory. And I did it.”
The show’s commercial success has been “shocking to everyone”, says Scelsa. It has toured in Australia, Norway and Singapore. The New York run, at the Public theatre, was sold out. At one point, they tried to split the show in two and run it on concurrent evenings, but “it totally backfired”, says Ariana Smart-Truman, the producer. “We realised that it’s hard for someone to come back two nights in a row. You have to get your babysitter back, find parking again. So people would see part one and say it’s terrific, but I’m not coming back. Part one would be full and part two would be half full.”
The impact of the show was also squandered. The extraordinary thing about Gatz is that, by the end, a feeling of common cause has arisen between the audience and the cast. You have been through this experience together; a usually private activity, reading, has been turned into a collective one and it is intensely, surprisingly moving. “This is not an experiment to test an audience to see how much they can take,” says Collins. “Durational performances have a special appeal, but that’s not what we’re doing here. The work you’re committing yourself to – The Great Gatsby – is worthy of it. It’s only as long as it has to be.” What’s more, he says, “if you want to make something that’s exceptionally successful, there have to be some things that are exceptional about it. It has to take risks.”
Even after all this time, when Shepherd reaches the end of another epic performance, he hardly knows how he got there. “I can’t contain the whole experience in my head at that moment – but I can feel the impact. We’ve all been there all day. It’s a pretty tremendous feeling.” Waves of emotion flow up from the audience, so different from their nerves at the start of the show. “It’s not as hard as they think it’s going to be. It turns out that literature works.”
• Gatz is at the Noel Coward theatre, London WC2, 8 June to 15 July. Details: liftfestival.com
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