Reviews

Gatz

By John Beer

 

At a time of exceedingly diminished expectations for the theater, few productions are more welcome than the Elevator Repair Service’s dazzling and conceptually rigorous Gatz, which played for a weekend last fall at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art. Simply put, Gatz is a six-and-a-half hour staging of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. A staging, and not exactly an adaptation, because the production revolves around a word-for-word reading of the novel by performer Scott Shepherd. After a brief opening sequence in which Shepherd establishes himself as an anonymous office worker in a barely functional office, he discovers Fitzgerald’s book tucked away in a rolodex. At first, Shepherd’s snatches of reading are punctuated by office business; gradually, though, he reads more continuously, and just as gradually, his coworkers begin to associate themselves with the characters from the novel: Tom and Daisy Buchanan, Jordan Baker, Gatsby himself. The piece traces the novel’s tragic arc until Shepherd recites its final iconic sentence and, turning out the lights, departs from his workplace.

Numerous aspects of Gatz can be invoked to explain its profound power, primary among them the accomplishment of Fitzgerald’s storytelling and hypnotically crafted prose and the creative energy with which Elevator Repair Service exploits the mundane setting to evoke the mansions and deadly autos of West Egg. The company marshals a remarkable blend of improvisatory, lo-fi wit and artistic discipline to make the piece consistently engrossing; despite its length, Gatz hardly tests its audience’s endurance. Yet it demands a response that goes beyond surface observations. What accounts for the sense that Gatz opens up genuinely new—if potentially disquieting—possibilities for the theater? When we say that the piece transforms our understanding of Fitzgerald’s novel, what are we trying to say? As members of Gatz‘s audience, how do we locate ourselves?

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Elevator Repair Service has been a presence in New York’s downtown theater scene since it was founded by artistic director John Collins and a group of actors in 1991. Collins had previously served as the sound director for the seminal avant-garde Wooster Group, with which Scott Shepherd also performs. Elevator Repair Service shares many of Wooster Group’s preoccupations, including a fascination with found text and objects and a disregard for the naturalistic conventions of the theater. Pieces staged throughout the 1990s featured scripts adapted from industrial documentaries and radio horror shows, while characters included thermoses and dot-matrix printers; in a version of Euripides’s Bacchae, Cadmus was represented by a pole in the performance area with googly-eyes attached. All along, the company has explicitly grappled in rehearsal and performance with the question, “What is theater?” The interest in found objects is not incidental to this question; by incorporating seemingly arbitrary, anti-theatrical elements, the company at once tests and reconfigures the boundaries of its artistic medium.