The trendy thing in theatre right now is to adapt F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (after all, there’s a musical running on Broadway right now, plus another musical circling New York, an immersive show, and a dance version). But John Collins and his theatre company Elevator Repair Service was performing Gatsby on the stage before it was cool (and in public domain). All the way back in 1999, ERS set out to see if they could adapt that seminal American novel. There was a problem, though: They didn’t know what to cut from it.

“The sense that we all had of this novel was that it was a perfectly constructed crystal where every little piece of it was an important part of this shape,” explains Collins. So, Collins, Steve Bodow (who had the initial idea for the project), and their friends gave themselves a challenge: “We're going to tell ourselves that we're going to do every word of it. We gave ourselves that assignment, believing that that would never work.”

Except it actually did work. ERS’ Gatz first premiered in New York in 2004, putting the company on the cultural map. The show has become so popular that the company has performed it Off-Broadway multiple times, and also in Los Angeles, Boston, Australia, Singapore—basically all around the world. On the way, it picked up an Obie Award and a Lucille Lortel Award. There was even a talk of a Broadway run in 2010 that fell through, says Collins, because the show needed a $3 million capitalization. "[The Public] was saying to us, 'Hey, if you could just find somebody who could drop a million bucks on it, I'm sure we could get this going," says Collins, adding in deadpan, "I don't have somebody I can ask for a million dollars."

Broadway never happened, but that didn't stop ERS. Now, to celebrate the centenary of the publication of the novel, ERS is bringing Gatz back to the Public Theater, in a run November 1–December 1.

Like one of Jay Gatsby’s parties, Gatz is an event. Because the show contains every single word of The Great Gatsby, including all the “he said” and “she said,” it has a mammoth running time of 6.5 hours—with intermission and a dinner break, it takes audiences eight hours to experience the whole thing. But unlike other adaptations, there are no flapper dresses or champagne to be found. Instead, the show opens in an office building, where a bored worker finds a copy of Gatsby at his desk and decides to read it aloud. Every single word.

But as you’re sitting there watching it (as this writer did back in 2012), suddenly, just through those words, the office transforms into 1920s Long Island. The worker who picks up the novel becomes Nick Carraway, his swaggerful boss becomes Jay Gatsby, and his coworkers become the novel’s many characters. “You see these people in this office who are normal, uninteresting people who find themselves becoming these characters from this book,” explains Collins. “It aligned beautifully with a lot of the themes of the novel.” The show also mirrors the real-life beauty of reading and how in that immersion, the entire world fades away and you can vividly see Gatsby’s mansion and Dr. T.J. Eckleburg’s billboard in your imagination.

Collins—who estimates as its director, he’s sat through the entirety of Gatz “maybe 250 times” (he can’t quite remember)—has become something of a Gatsby expert. During our hour-long conversation, he easily quotes from the book from memory. To him, over the 100 years since Gatsby has existed, with its numerous films and stage adaptations, the novel has become diluted into a series of aesthetics—the flapper dresses, feather headdresses, the parties, opulence, black and gold. “It's disappointing to me that a lot of adaptations take some liberties that completely abandoned the story or missed the point,” he muses. Instead, to him, the Roaring ’20s aspect of the novel “are all attached to the mythology of Gatsby himself. And I always feel like anyone who really concentrates their effort on recreating all of that Gatsby mythology is just another mindless Gatsby party guest. The people in the novel who are obsessed with those things, his parties as well as his mystery—those are the unserious people in the novel.” Or as, as Fitzgerald once wrote, which Collins quotes, “They were careless people…they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness.”

When ERS first started performing Gatz, it was presented in two parts over two nights. But that meant many audience members only saw the first half, and weren't enticed into staying for the second. “We had people coming and just seeing the first half and going like, ‘This is too light.’ They wanted to feel the seriousness of the novel. I totally stand by the way we do the first half, it is very true to the novel. But it doesn't sell the idea all by itself as well as it does when sitting for the whole thing.” This is why since 2010, the company has sold Gatz as one eight-hour day. Doing it as one long day allowed the audience to bask not just in the parties, but to experience the hangover—and in those lows, the true beauty of the novel.

To Collins, the real heart of Gatsby is the novel’s last chapter, chapter nine—which is usually truncated in many adaptations. The chapter contains Gatsby’s funeral where no one shows up, none of his rich friends or his lover, Daisy. Instead, the only people in attendance are Nick and Gatsby’s father, Henry Gatz, who—despite his son’s every attempt to distance himself from his poor upbringing—is proud of what Gatsby accomplished. The elder Gatz is usually cut in other adaptations.

“In some ways, [it's] my favorite part of the book,” says Collins. “I remember in the movie, the most recent [Baz Luhrmann-directed] movie, they sort of cut straight to, ‘As I sat there brooding on the old unknown world,’ without any of the actual brooding on the unknown world.’ It’s some of the most beautiful writing, some of the most complicated and interesting writing in the book. And they just want to get to that last line, which is a shame.”

That is why the show is called Gatz; it’s Jay Gatsby’s true name, James Gatz, the one he tries to abandon but cannot escape. To Collins, the novel is a statement on the myth of the American dream. “What's sort of beautiful and touching about it is the way in which those people, all of their façades fall away, and they become themselves again. Gatsby, in the end, is just a poor kid from the Midwest…There's a sort of misleading appeal to this idea of Gatsby, who recreates himself into this heroic self-made man. But of course, the novel is all about that [notion of] falling apart. And it's tragic and sad.”

Not to mention that Gatz’s portrayal of chapter nine is particularly moving. In the show, Gatsby is played by Jim Fletcher (who’s been playing the role without missing a performance for over a decade) and Henry Gatz is played by Fletcher’s father, Ross Fletcher—a Washington, D.C.-based cardiologist who moonlights as an actor in Gatz. “He has never missed a performance,” says Collins, smiling. “Sometimes, he'd go give a talk somewhere—he would get the hospital to sign off on it if he could provide some nominal [medical] excuse for being abroad. He was with us for a month in Australia.”

In fact, unlike other long-running shows, those who have performed in Gatz tend to stay with the show. ERS has other shows in its repertoire, featuring the same company of actors. So whenever it cycles back to Gatz, those who have done the show usually return, having trained their bodies to endure its long running time. In fact, Scott Shepherd, who plays Nick, has done the show so many times he’s memorized the entire book by heart.

So for those of you who love a theatrical event, get your tickets to Gatz fast. Collins says that this will be the final time ERS will perform Gatz in New York, adding with a laugh, “We've been doing it for 20 years…There's a character in the book Meyer Wolfsheim who, at one point, says, ‘I'm going to go away and let you young men enjoy your lunch, because I am old.’”

But ERS is not looking to be borne back ceaselessly into their past. Though he has a poster of Gatz prominently displayed in his home office, Collins really wants to focus ERS’ resources towards a new show, an adaptation of James Joyce’s Ulysses (which they’re hoping to bring to NYC next year). Unlike Gatz, ERS’s Ulysses is not going to span the entire novel. How much of the novel to include is still up for debate, though Collins promises every chapter will be in the show. “We aren't going to be able to do the whole thing, because that wouldn't take six and a half hours—that would take something like 28,” says Collins. Though like Gatsby, Ulysses is also an iconic piece of 1920s literature: “It’s the thing that everyone tries and fails to read. So it's got a special lore all its own.”

For now, Collins is trying to move forward while taking this nostalgic look back. But he is adamant that there are currently no plans to bring the show to Broadway, and that this truly is Gatz’s final swan song in New York. But, when pressed about the possibility of another NYC run with the right financing, Collins does add, suggestively, “There could be ways of talking us out of that.”

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Photos: Elevator Repair Service's Gatz

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