Gatz

In BIT Teatergarasjens' autumn program 2006 it was written about Gatz:

The production Gatz is an ambitious, successful fairytale from the exciting theatre company Elevator Repair Service from New York. This is a delicacy for everyone loving F. Scott Fitzgerald's great novel and a must for everyone who likes theatre. The performance endures for a full six and a half hours and is played by 13 actors.

Gatz also is an acknowledging nod to Andy Kaufman. Kaufman tried at several occasions to read the novel out loud in stand up clubs, but he was always booed off stage.

The visiting performance was the last part of the project USA NÅ! (literally: USA NOW!), presented by the performing arts network of Black Box, BIT and Avant Garden, plus Performance Space 122 with support from The American Embassy in Norway.

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"A STORY ABOUT ELEVATOR REPAIR SERVICE, THE GREAT GATSBY AND GATZ

By John Collins (director), March 2006

Director’s Note: A history of ERS and The Great Gatsby, and Gatz

Few American students make it out of school without reading F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. It is generally agreed to be The Great American Novel. Hollywood has made several movies out of it, most famously with Robert Redford in the title role. The book has a sort of symbolic place in American culture and everyone in America knows something about it, but most remember it as a colourful depiction of the roaring twenties and have forgotten what makes it a literary masterpiece and not just an interesting artefact of the Jazz Age: namely, Fitzgerald's spare and beautiful prose.

1993: Elevator Repair Service first encountered Gatsby in 1993 while doing research for a piece about the comedian Andy Kaufman. Kaufman, known for his outrageous avant-garde shtick, would sometimes take the stage at a comedy club and drive the audience mad by reading The Great Gatsby to them. He would come out wearing a smoking jacket and start on page one, speaking in a pretentious upper-class voice, and the crowd, after laughing uncertainly for a while, eventually either left or booed him off the stage, as it became clear that he wasn't going to stop until he finished the book. In 1993 ERS was more interested in Kaufman than Fitzgerald (although a bit of Gatsby did find its way into that show - Language Instruction: Love Family vs. Andy Kaufman - as a muttered text fragment in the final dance number). But The Great Gatsby came back to our attention in 1999 when a company member suggested it as material for the next piece. So we bought a few copies of the book and tried to figure out how to make a viable work of theatre out of it.

1999: We were immediately interested in the basic formal problem: how to put a novel on the stage without turning it into a play? Could we make a live event out of the book without spoiling its bookness? In the first rehearsals we experimented with various strategies, but whenever we tried to substitute stage action for literary description, or even to omit a few supposedly unnecessary words (e.g. "he said"), we found ourselves feeling cheated out of something. Some mysterious power in Fitzgerald's style, or in the type of event we were contemplating, was destroyed when the integrity of the text was compromised, and we realized the only satisfactory approach for us would be to read every word in the book. In a sense we had come back around to Andy Kaufman's Gatsby stunt, with the rather important difference that getting booed off the stage was not our goal. In 1999 we made a promising start, with a table full of found-object puppets and several actors running around with books in hand, but the project hit a snag when the Fitzgerald Estate denied us permission to use the text. A television movie starring Mira Sorvino was in the works, so the book was off limits to everyone else. For a while we tried to continue the project using a different Fitzgerald novel, The Love of the Last Tycoon, but that didn't work, and eventually we dropped the novel-on-stage idea completely and developed a piece based on Euripides' The Bacchae called Highway To Tomorrow, starring one of the Gatsby puppets (an aluminium thermos with two plastic eyes taped to the top of it).

2003: It wasn't until 2003 that I decided to revisit the idea of staging Gatsby. I held a few rehearsals with two actors, including Scott Shepherd who plays Nick, in a cramped little office above a small downtown theatre. We decided to use that crummy office as an imaginative setting for the reading of the book. The actors played two employees in the office and Scott's character, we decided, would have a sort of compulsive obsession that made him read The Great Gatsby out loud while he was at work. We concentrated on sections of the book that featured Gatsby and Nick (the narrator) and started looking for ways to draw connections between those characters and our office-world characters. This grew into a 20-minute piece with four actors which we workshopped in late 2003. It included three separate sections (from chapters 1, 4 and 5), and used the office setting, and even incorporated some of the earliest material we had developed back in 1999. Obviously we omitted the text between the sections, but the sections themselves were unabridged, and this short piece gave us a template for staging the whole book.

2004: In the spring of 2004 we finished staging the first half of the book and presented it as a 3-hour work-in-progress. The cast was expanded almost to its final size. At this stage we really began to understand the longer rhythms that would become fundamental to our durational event, with the imaginative focus plunging completely into Fitzgerald's story and then re-emerging into the more mundane reality of our grungy office. Meanwhile we were back in contact with the Fitzgerald Estate about performance rights. Once again we found out that a competing project had pre-empted us. This time it wasn't Hollywood, it was Broadway. Sort of. A playwright in California had written a stage version of The Great Gatsby and his producers had purchased an option on the book, with the apparent intention of developing a large-scale commercial production for Broadway and the West End. However, our contact at the agency representing the Estate assured us that this commercial option was not an exclusive arrangement, and he encouraged us to continue developing our piece. He seemed confident that we would be able to secure special permission for a smaller-scale verbatim-reading project. "I’m going to recommend that they give this the green light", he said. Then, late in 2004, our contact abruptly left the agency without explanation. For a while there was some confusion at the agency about who to reassign our proposal to, and then, about a week and a half before our scheduled premiere of the full-length Gatz - with the set already standing in the theatre and the show already publicized - we got definitive word from the estate that they would not grant us permission to perform.

2005: We had no choice but to cancel the show, publicly at least. We made a formal announcement that the performances were cancelled, and launched a last-minute email campaign inviting our friends and several European and American presenters to come and watch private rehearsals. These underground showings had an exhilarating speakeasy feel to them, with people making their way through a blizzard to an inconspicuous building in downtown Manhattan, having their names verified on an exclusive invite list, and coming inside to sit for six hours in an under heated garage theatre listening to The Great American Novel. In fact we got a brusque rebuke from the Estate's agency when they got wind of these secret performances, but by that time the die had been cast. The response to Gatz was tremendous among those who had been lucky enough to see it, and several presenters in Europe and the US were now interested in producing it. With these definite offers from around the world, we renewed our efforts to negotiate an agreement with the Estate, and in the middle of 2005 we signed a contract which allowed us to perform Gatz anywhere outside the US and UK. For venues within the US and UK, the Estate reserved the right to grant or deny permission on a case-by-case basis.

2006: Since then we have booked engagements in many cities including Brussels, Amsterdam, Paris, Minneapolis, Zurich, Oslo and Bergen. Ironically, the one city in which the Estate continues to withhold permission for Gatz is New York, ERS's own hometown and the setting for much of The Great Gatsby. After rejecting two separate proposals for a New York production, first at New York Theatre Workshop and then at the Public Theatre, the Estate’s agency informed us explicitly that we would have to "stay away from New York" as long as the commercial adaptation of Gatsby still had Broadway plans. Interestingly enough, in spite of the Estate’s attempts to keep Gatz and the commercial Gatsby geographically separated, both had their US premieres in Minneapolis about two months apart! Luckily for us, by the time the Guthrie Theatre decided to open its 2006 season with The Great Gatsby, we had already secured the Estate's approval for our premiere at the Walker Art Centre in September.

The New York theatre company Elevator Repair Service was created 1991. It guarantees original theatre performances based on literature, film, television and existing text material. ERS' style combines traditional drama with slapstick comedy, hi- and lo-tech design and a very refined, peculiar approach of choreography. The company's most recent work focuses on classical literature, with an adaptation of Henry James' Turn of the Screw, and now also F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. Under the artistic direction of the co-directors John Collins and Steve Bodow, the company could be seen about all over New York and has also been touring extensively in Europe and North America. ERS has become a standard in the experimental theatre history of New York and has been praised many times by the national and international press. In 1998 ERS was at the KunstenFESTIVALdesArts with Cab Legs, a show that was much applauded by the audience and the reviewers.

John Collins March 2006"

Source:

BIT Teatergarasjen, autumn program 2006. 20.09.2010: http://www.bit-teatergarasjen.no

Brantley, Ben (05.02.1010). A Novel ‘Gatsby’: Stamina Required. The New York Times., nytimes.com, 07.12.2010, http://theater.nytimes.com/2010/02/05/theater/reviews/05notebook.html?pagewanted=1&sq=elevator%20repair%20service&st=cse&scp=2:
"But the most astonishing metamorphosis is that undergone by the cast, whose interpretations of Fitzgerald’s creations go from quotation-mark-framed stiffness or jokiness into a style that is compellingly sincere without ever being purely naturalistic. Mr. Shepherd, in a performance of symphonic calibration, progresses from detached curiosity to intense engagement to an emotional fluency that allows him to discard the book altogether and recite from memory."

Bjørneboe, Therese (12.12.2006). Review titled Romanen som roman (literally: The novel as a novel). Klassekampen, klassekampen.no, 07.12.2010, http://www.klassekampen.no/41809/mod_article/item:
"With this kind of "text fetishism" Elevator Repair Service can be said to be bucking modern theatre's idée fixe that freedom to play with a text (any) is in itself the guarantee and foundation of theatre's position as its own medium or independent art form. (...) Gatz is not the kind of interpretation one expects in the theatre, but dear God, how precisely it captures the novel. The clue lies in Gatsby's past (like Orson Welles's Rosebud), the moment when he falls for Daisy and which for the rest of his life he pursues and tries to recover. "...into the past" are the novel's last words, and the last words from Scott Shepherd before the ovation breaks out and the performance goes the way of the flesh, the same way Gatsby has just gone, his corpse lying on the faux-leather couch in the office. The theatre performance is over, the characters dissolved into the air. Gatz ought to be mandatory for all theatre people."