The Great Great Gatsby

Care to watch "Gatz" - a seven HOUR performance based on Fitzgerald's famous novel? Learn more about it, here.

From the story in the New York Times...

This is how “Gatz,” Elevator Repair Service’s seven-hour performance now at the Public Theater, begins. When I saw it last winter, produced by the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Mass., the set was a spectacularly cluttered office that appeared to be part warehouse, part paper-pushing operation and part waiting room — not a bad metaphor, if you think about it, for the inside of your own head. And what goes on in your head is, in a way, the real subject of “Gatz,” which is not, strictly speaking, a staged reading of “The Great Gatsby,” even though every one of the book’s 47,000 words is pronounced onstage. Neither is it a dramatic adaptation of Fitzgerald’s novel. It’s more a dramatization of the act of reading itself — of what happens when you immerse yourself in a book.

Slowly, over half an hour or so, the man in the office (Scott Shepherd) starts to become interested in what he’s reading. Pretty soon he’s doing the voices, raising his pitch almost to a falsetto for Daisy Buchanan and artificially deepening it for Tom. And then, miraculously, people who have been silently coming in and out of the office, going about their workaday business, begin to imitate the characters, speaking the lines and even acting them out. A young woman who had been idly reading a golf magazine turns into Jordan Baker. A bullying, key-jangling janitor becomes Tom. Wilson, the garage mechanic, emerges — of course! — from the tech guy, summoned to deal with all that balkycomputer equipment.

This, or something like it, is what happens when you get caught up in a book.