Elevator Repair Service‘s Gatz (@ the American Rep through Feb. 7) at six hours (not counting the breaks and intermissions) is marathon theater. Even if you do all ten hours of the Boston Theater Marathon, this is something entirely different. It takes the patience of an ardent reader, or at least someone set on getting their hundred bucks worth, to listen to someone read a book all day, especially a book where you already know what happens. But, for those that stick around, and Gatz only works if you see both parts, it offers that unique pleasure inherent to the novel, that has so much to do with the duration of the narrative.
There’s nothing like finishing a good book that you’ve been committed to for hours or days or weeks and it’s a completely different feeling than that which comes at the end of the shorter narratives of plays and films. Aside from offering resolution, the final chapter of a (good) novel engenders a feeling of contentment, satisfaction, and peace–a moment of nirvana that validates the time you’ve put into this text. A Dan Brown book, like a television movie, might sufficiently tease our desire to know to force us from one chapter into the next (or through commercial breaks), but it takes a book like The Great Gatsby to bring us to a satisfying melancholic awe during and following its final lines.
Once the full-text recitation of Gatz reaches chapter 9, our narrator Nick (Scott Shepherd) puts down his paperback and relaxes into the confident and vaguely Western-accented voice that he slowly builds towards throughout the entire play. He recites the final chapter of Gatsby with ease–to think that in chapter one he intentionally stumbled over “Dukes of Buccleuch.” It rolls of his tongue as he faces us, and speaks to us, without the book below his eyes for the first time. Chapter 9 is one of the most meticulously contrived chapters in the book and, even though it’s not, it feels like a eulogy to the character whose mysterious identity is what makes the book such a page-turner, and thus so accessible and popular. Shepherd narrates it with a solemn elegance that’s not just apt to Fitzgerald’s prose and subject matter, but also to the process of reading, or finishing, a book. What Gatz does so superbly, is translate the act of reading to the stage, taking an inner process and experience and making it a shared and performed one.
This season we’ve seen the ART do more “immersive” theater, where we’re thrown into nontheater settings so that we might have more unique and “fun” theatrical experiences, but this is the first one, despite its epic duration, that turns the volume down and works to extract and transfer an inner relationship we all have with the novel. Rather than attempt a large exterior theatrical experience (e.g. the party of the The Donkey Show, the active puzzle of Sleep No More), it reaches for a deeply personal interior experience that’s not usually activated inside of a theater. The final chapter of Gatz is worth all six hours and more flawless than anything in Shakespeare Exploded, because having that moment of completing a novel at a play, in a theater, is something special and different.
Of course, there is some lag leading up to those compelling final scenes that force one to a standing ovation. The play builds upon its self slowly and while Fitzgerald’s language may offer rewards to those who pick up the book and read a passage or two, Gatz doesn’t, even if you know the text as well as Scott Shepherd. Stay tuned for part two.
Scott Shepherd (as Nick) and Kate Scelsa (as Lucille). (Chris Beirens)
