Description
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Gatz meal packages
“One of those I-WAS-THERE productions… people will talk about for many, many years.” The Bulletin, Philadelphia
The Hit Of The International Festival Circuit
James Gatz — that was really, or at least legally, his name.
A low-rent office. A mysterious business. An employee picks up a copy of The Great Gatsby.
He opens the book. Reads it aloud… and can’t stop!
By a strange sort of magic, amid files and office furnishings, his co-workers morph into Jazz Age denizens of New York high society; reliving parties, chasing dreams, re-enacting the plot.
A six-hour tour de force, with a cast of thirteen, this is NOT a stage adaptation of Fitzgerald’s novel, but a reading of the entire book – brilliantly brought to life by one of America’s most exciting theatre companies.
“Theatre of the highest order.” Time Out, New York
Duration: 7 Hours and 35 minutes including 3 intervals (totaling 95 minutes)
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Photo: Chris Beirens, John Collins, Ariana Smart Truman and Gene Pittman.
Synopsis
Gatz, presented by New York's Elevator Repair Service, is a production people will talk about for many, many years.
It is on the simplest level a literal, line-by-line complete reading of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. The company adds the conceit that a man working in a dingy office, probably in New York, one day comes to work, can't get his computer to work and so begins reading Gatsby out loud.
While this may seem thin in the tradition of great theatre, it is much more than any description will convey.
Director John Collins started rehearsing Gatz in 1999. The more he worked with his cast on the script, the more he was certain he wanted to use every word of Fitzgerald's novel.
The company had problems getting the estate's permission to use the entire text of The Great Gatsby in a production. Collins put the delay to good use. The company continued to rehearse for love of their craft and because they became enamoured with the text.
The result is a revelatory deconstruction of Fitzgerald that points out much of the hokum in the writing, while compassionately transforming it into a revelatory humour.
It seems no member of the cast meets Fitzgerald's description of his characters. Nick is short and red haired, Daisy is lithe, but a brunette, Tom looks and acts like the Dunkin' Donuts man on a diet, round with a face dominated by a black moustache.
Yet the cast is taut as a virtuoso's violin string as it brings layers of nuance and remembered, unnoticed, intended and unintended meaning to the text.
In the contemporary America of haves and have-nots, where East Coast Ivy League-educated elites direct the country into disasters without analysing the costs and consequences of their actions, Gatsby takes on a revelatory meaning and relevance for our times.
This performance held the audience's complete attention for 6.5 hours. During the three 10-minute breaks and one-hour intermission for a meal, the audience remained enthralled with the storytelling, anxious to retake their seats to hear more of the oft-told tale.
But glory belonged not to the actors alone. The company worked as a seamless whole. Collins' direction made full use of Louisa Thompson's imaginative set design, relying heavily on Mark Barton's chilling lighting design while gleefully incorporating Ben Williams' memorable sound design. These production values, for all their considerable demonstration of professional prowess, just managed to keep up with the cast's incredible dedication, discipline, athleticism, stamina and talent.
Gatz is one of those I-Was-There productions that only live performance art can give to an audience.
For every individual there, what Gatz is will be measured by its ability to grow in importance and satisfaction as, a decade, two decades or more later, you find the one person among millions who also witnessed that event and you both rejoice in that happy circumstance by recalling the amazing drinking scene, or the way a certain moment was lit, or the subtle sound design. And all the while you are really only just celebrating and affirming the special knowledge that you have met someone who can attest that once you really did witness the magic, the moment, the chemistry of something great.
(Article from The Bulletin, Philadelphia)
Reviews
Personal letter from the Theatre Editor of Time Out New York to Elevator Repair Service (September 4, 2007)
Dear John and the cast and crew of Gatz:
Words can barely convey how thrilled I was to see Gatz, more than two years after kicking myself for missing it at the Performing Garage. This is simply brilliantly crafted theater of the highest order. It's the most sophisticated literary adaptation for the stage that I have ever seen, one of the most living, complex stage organisms I've ever witnessed. I feel like I lived in that world for seven and a half hours.
Gatz ranks up there with Wallace Shawn’s The Designated Mourner, Ariane Mnouchkine’s Le Dernier Caravanserail, The Wooster Group’s The Emperor Jones and Complicite’s Mnemonic as one of the most enriching theater experiences I've ever had. You leave the theater, and your relationship to objects, surface, light, is charged with the weird energy that you felt being exchanged between you in your seat and the actors onstage. You eat a cookie, turn a page in a magazine, hear other people’s chatter and feel slightly abstracted from your body and reality because your mind was so consumed by the images and sounds. It's almost like you're a ghost after the show because your body is still in the audience.
I have to admit that I never read the novel in high school or after, but I don't care, since this way of absorbing the book was so rich and beautiful. I felt like you gave me the book in a way I could never have imagined.
Your orchestration of the design elements, the architecture of the piece, still causes my mind to reel. Themes of rootlessness, escapism in art and pleasure, social aspiration, living a lie, and so on, were beautifully expressed by that sad, rueful man in a crummy office reading the book. The office itself was both brutally real and wholly metaphorical. It was as if the office existed inside the fictional Gatsby's head, a tucked-away memory (premonition?) of banal beauty.
Scott just tore my heart out. Overall, you directed one of the best casts I've ever seen. Again, I want to congratulate you for crafting such a brilliant, haunting show.
Yours truly,
David Cote
Theater Editor
Time Out New York
“Witness the magic, the moment, the chemistry of something great.” The Bulletin, Philadelphia
“Breathtakingly good theatre. The multiple layers are played with unbelievable cleverness by the thirteen actors. Scott Shepherd as Nick is a masterful narrator who carries the hypnotic rhythm of this marathon performance with seeming ease… leaves the audience with that melancholy emptiness that comes with the end of something great.” Het Parool, Amsterdam
"Gatz creates its own dramatic universe. It illuminates a familiar text, breathing strange new life into it while honouring its inherent completeness. One is left not primarily with the expected exhaustion, but with a unique and lasting texture of amusement, insight and possibility." Variety
“In a staging that teems with good ideas, John Collins pulls off an incredible gamble, transposing this story of passion and new riches on verdant Long Island into a world of filing and paperwork.” Le Soir, Brussels
“A theatrical tour-de-force from the New York Company Elevator Repair Service… Gatz is fascinating to watch: exciting and funny and extremely well thought out.” De Volkskrant, Amsterdam
"Gatz is not the kind of interpretation one expects in the theatre, but God, how precisely it captures the novel... Gatz ought be mandatory for all people of the theatre.” Klassekampen, Oslo