Gatz
Theater review by David Cote
[Note: This is a review of the 2010 production of Gatz. The show returns to the Public in 2024 with most of its original cast.]
“Since the introduction of printing, and the fatal development of the habit of reading amongst the middle and lower classes,” Oscar Wilde wrote in The Critic as Artist, “there has been a tendency in literature to appeal more and more to the eye, and less and less to the ear which…from the standpoint of pure art, it should seek to please.” An aesthete who elevated recitation over print, Wilde would have been quite flummoxed by Gatz, the jaw-dropping literary installation by Elevator Repair Service. This eight-hour-plus immersion—in which 13 actors read aloud every blessed word of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby—is thoroughly aural, even musical. And yet, the production acts upon the eye, through a meticulously layered physical score buzzing around Scott Shepherd, our intensely listenable narrator. Shepherd reads beautifully; we watch him read; we listen; we imagine that we read along with him; and so Fitzgerald’s images are burned into our brains by an indirect circuit of seeing and hearing on intermeshed levels. After eight hours of this, our narrative-absorbing faculties have been so recalibrated that we forget where ERS’s frame ends and Fitzgerald’s picture begins.
Directors John Collins and Steve Bodow and their ensemble created the piece and presented a work-in-progress in January 2005 in the Wooster’s Group’s