Gatz Director’s Note

We first started to work with The Great Gatsby in 1999.  Then, we had a very different idea about how to stage the show.  We didn’t imagine we’d actually stage the entire book and in the earliest workshops, some characters were played by crude puppets we made by attaching eyes to various household objects.  One of these has survived to make a brief appearance in Gatz.

Still, the idea to perform every word of the book came to us early in the process.  We knew we were interested in the writing, not just the story, and we quickly found that some mysterious power in Fitzgerald’s style was always compromised when we made abridgements.  The prose is so delicately and expertly constructed that even the omission of a single adjective is rhythmically disappointing.

Often, ERS shows begin with a proposal to do something difficult or impossible and almost always we look for a way to bring non-theater material to the stage.  When editing The Great Gatsby started to feel problematic, one simple, obvious, and thrillingly ridiculous idea occurred to us: treat the novel as a novel and don’t try to make it into a play.  And so we set about devising ways to make the novel work on stage in its entirety, keeping every “he said” and “she said.”  Here was an enticing “impossible” task to work on and an exciting piece of non-theater material.

The absurdity of the idea was not lost on us.  Only a few years before, we’d made a show about the comedian Andy Kaufman.  In one of Kaufman’s more infamous bits, he would take the stage at a comedy club and, sporting a smoking jacket and a cartoonish upper-class accent, begin reading The Great Gatsby.  Kaufman aimed to provoke his audiences with an outlandish stunt.  We saw a greater possibility; we thought it might actually work as theater.

But in 1999 we had to set The Great Gatsby aside.  The A&E network was developing a movie version starring Mira Sorvino, and as a result the theatrical rights were unavailable.  So we moved on to other projects.

I came back to Gatsby in 2003, meeting informally with Scott Shepherd (who plays Nick) and another actor in a cramped office above a small theater downtown.  Working in that space is what gave us the idea that eventually became the frame story for Gatz: an employee in a grungy office reading the book out loud at his desk.

By the spring of 2004, several actors had joined the effort and, over the course of several weeks of workshops, we had created staging for the first half of the book, about three hours of material.  Now we were starting to understand the longer rhythms that would become fundamental to the durational event we hoped to put on, with the imaginative focus sometimes plunging completely into Fitzgerald’s story, and then resurfacing into the more mundane reality of the low-rent office.

Over the next few months, we expanded the piece and developed staging for the entire novel.  In the meantime, we contacted the Fitzgerald estate and found out the theatrical rights were tied up again. This time, a commercial theater production was in the works, a stage adaptation of the novel with Broadway aspirations. The producers had purchased an option on the book, but had no concrete plans for a New York production. It wasn’t clear to us just how exclusive this other arrangement was and we had hopes that permission might be available for a verbatim-reading event like the one we were proposing.

On this hope we gambled and lost. We went ahead with plans to present Gatz in New York in January 2005, and had to cancel the performances at the last minute when the permission didn’t come through.

However, a few European and American producers had seen rehearsals and with their interest and a little persistence we were able to forge an agreement with the estate and take the show on tour (New York would still have to wait indefinitely). Gatz premiered in Brussels in May 2006 and has since played six cities in the U.S. (beginning with its American premiere in Minneapolis) and in eight countries abroad, most recently at The Sydney Opera House in Australia.

Back in 2008, Gatz was invited to Cambridge.  A year later, the Fitzgerald estate gave us the go-ahead for the A.R.T. run, the longest Gatz has seen in its five years of performance.  And it seems to have helped open an even bigger door.  In November of 2009, the estate gave us the permission we’ve been hoping for since 1999.  After over a decade of brainstorming, rehearsing, performing all over the world, negotiating, and waiting, Gatz will finally come home to New York City next season.

John Collins
Director, Gatz