Gatz Tries a Novel Approach to Fitzgerald
Tendered is the text in ERS's latest show
Hearing the entire book spoken aloud, though, does reveal the source of its durability: It’s two books in one. Gatsby’s idealized love for Daisy, like his emptily luxurious life, is a romantic daydream, a dirt-poor kid’s fantasy of wealth and elegance. Nick, who comes to love Gatsby for his total faith in this dream, also exists to ironize it; he knows the selfish realities of Tom and Daisy’s upper-crust world too well to share the dream. Readers get the romantic thrill and its sardonic corrective in a single serving, sometimes perfectly blended in one of those infallible Fitzgerald sentences.
Details
By F. Scott Fitzgerald and Elevator Repair Service
The Public Theater
425 Lafayette Street
212-967-7555, publictheater.org
Related Content
More About
Fitzgerald didn’t need ERS to create that effect. Yet he owes them something for their cockeyed, Gatsby-like, faith in his text. Particularly, he owes much to the doggedness of Shepherd, whose voice, understandably, gets a little gray with fatigue in the last quarter of this seven-hour event, but who never loses variety or a feeling for verbal nuance. What intentions fuel ERS’s experiments with great American novels remains an open question; whether such experiments are worth pursuing remains a bigger one. But with Gatz, particularly given Shepherd’s manifest devotion to this enormous effort, nobody can accuse them of not loving the great works they tackle.
