America: Boom, Bust, and Baseball Guide: Page to Stage, Elevator Repair Service reimagines The Great Gatsby

For Elevator Repair Service (ERS), pleasure comes from problems. “We’re not a theater company making shows,” says Artistic Director John Collins, “we are shows making a theater company.” A scavenger at heart Collins forages outside the theater for works to stage. The challenges of turning material from outside of the theater into stage magic inspire ERS to create their exhilarating work. With the success of Gatz, their theatrical interpretation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby, the company has exploded internationally.

The dramatic canon, Collins says, raises fewer problems to solve. “Someone’s already done the work of imagining how it will fit on the stage,” he explains. “I like picking up something that doesn’t yet have a way of existing on stage.” In productions like Gatz, The Sun Also Rises, and The Sound and the Fury, novels spurred the ensemble’s innovation. In other works by ERS, Indian musicals, Betty Boop cartoons, film noir, and documentaries served as inspiration.

With the company’s recent focus on novels, challenges related to language and length arose. Written prose intended for the eye is usually longer and more complex than spoken language. But Collins contends, “I don’t buy that it’s harder to listen to. It’s different to listen to.” Collins says excessive veneration for great prose works can result in a dull reading out-loud style. ERS’s rehearsal process, however, generates solutions for translating literary prose into stage dialogue. The company begins by sitting down together and reading the entire work aloud— the first time, The Great Gatsby took five hours. The early rehearsals with actors Scott Shepherd and James Urbaniak in a cramped office space served as the accidental inspiration for the setting. Collins explains, “We decided Scott, an employee of this mysterious little office, would suffer from a strange compulsion to read The Great Gatsby aloud at work. James, his boss, would be so accustomed to Scott’s mild madness that he would tolerate it. At times he would play along and read in for the other characters. I realized that we were making a play that was as much about the experience of reading as it was about a mysterious rich man on Long Island in the 1920s.”

During these early rehearsals, Collins sensed a delicate structure in Fitzgerald’s writing. Compared to other novels staged by ERS, Collins says, “Gatsby’s the one that benefits the most from not being messed with at all, not cutting anything.”

Because every word and syllable felt essential, the company searched for a way to perform the text that would not distract from it. The office setting allowed the actors initial detachment from the work: an acknowledgement of the theatrical event. “In the beginning, Scott is an anonymous office drone who’s not sure he gets the book. By the end he is Nick Carraway,” Collins says. Gradually, the other actors experience similar transformations as they enter the office and unwittingly become the characters. “They get caught up and then can’t extract themselves,” Collins explains.

By presenting the story this way, ERS liberates its audience. “If you try too hard to represent something down to the last detail, you take away the possibility for the audience’s imagination to work,” Collins says. The narrator’s absurd situation augments the text’s humor, allowing the audience to laugh at this classic. Collins explains:

“There’s humor in the contrast we create between the setting that’s described and the setting that the audience sees. As the characters grope around for objects in the office to stand in for objects described in the book, a kind of comedy materializes around that. This drab setting was perfectly opposed to the opulence of the book. To have a background that actively resisted the descriptions of the novel meant that there would be nothing competing for the audience’s imagination of what Fitzgerald described. It created a great backdrop onto which the audience could project their imagination of the novel.

“People feel there’s something sacred about written language. We don’t take it so seriously. So we hear the humor in it. Fitzgerald himself is irreverent and that gets lost in worship of the book. Nick is a wonderfully dry comedian. Many of his observations are much funnier when you hear them aloud than when you read them. Speaking them elevates their humor.” Collins doesn’t like to compare the experience of seeing ERS’s show with the experience of reading the book. “They are two distinct experiences,” he says, “and one cannot stand in for the other. There is a feeling of immediacy that the performance delivers.” By elevating the humor and providing a fresh frame for the story, ERS enables audiences to reimagine this classic and experience every word of this novel in a new way.

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