Synopsis

James Gatz — that was really, or at least legally, his name.

One morning in the shabby office of a mysterious small business, an employee finds a copy of The Great Gatsby in the clutter on his desk. He starts to read it out loud and doesn't stop. At first his coworkers hardly notice. But after a series of strange coincidences, it's no longer clear whether he's reading the book or the book is transforming him.

8 hours long and with a cast of 13, Gatz is by far the New-York-based Elevator Repair Service Theatre Company's most ambitious endeavor yet — not a retelling of the Gatsby story but an enactment of the novel itself. Fitzgerald's American masterpiece is delivered word for word, startlingly brought to life by low-rent office staff in the midst of their inscrutable business operations.

The schedule of performance is as follows:

Act 1 – 2 hours and 5 minutes
Interval – 15 minutes

Act 2 – 1 hour and 15 minutes
Long Interval – 1 hour and 15 minutes

Act 3 – 1 hour and 25 minutes
Interval – 15 minutes

Act 4 – 1 hour and 30 minutes

Our Review:

Michael Coveney - 14 June 2012

A listless office worker, Nick, picks up a copy of The Great Gatsby and starts reading it. His colleagues are sucked in and act out F Scott Fitzgerald’s words (all 50,000 of them in the short novella) over the next eight hours or so.

Nick, played by Scott Shepherd, book-in-hand for all except the last enraptured, reflective 40 minutes, becomes Nick Carraway, Fitzgerald’s ambivalent narrator who works in New York’s financial district in the post-war 1920s and becomes embroiled in Jay Gatsby’s hedonistic Long Island lifestyle and his obsession with Daisy Buchanan.

John Collins’ production for the Elevator Repair Service of New York, presented by LIFT, comes trailing all sorts of recommendations for its radical austerity, but it strikes me as failing to have any interesting attitude to its material, to be lazily engineered in the modern dowdy office setting, and to be deeply non-theatrical.

[WOS_QU@TE]...

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Latest User Review

Nick Moon - 15 July 2012:

I went with some trepidation about the endurance test element, but was mesmersied throughout. The way the office workers get slowly drawn in helped pace it, and they managed to add some visual and aural jokes with detracting from the book. And it was a real tour de force from Scott Shepherd,e specially the last, bookles, 40 minutes...

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