DESCRIPTION WITHOUT PLACE.
criticism. decorum. innards. bric-a-brac. nostalgia. nausea. polemics. diatribes. litanies. symphonies. polaroids.
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On Fitzgerald
It occurred to me late last Sunday night that Scott Shepard had been on stage reading The Great Gatsby for 32 of the previous 80 hours. The Elevator Repair Service is returning to the Public Theater in March and April for a reprise of Gatz, and I can say this unequivocally; this is an important work. There have been plays - The King’s Men performing King Lear, Edwin Booth’s Hamlet, Sarah Bernhardt’s Zaire, Robeson’s Othello, Spaulding Grey’s Swimming to Cambodia - where you had to be there, and if you were someone who valued a date with relevance over an evening with obscurity, you were.
Seeing Gatz for the second time at Princeton this past weekend, allowing myself the privilege of sinking into the chair and disconnecting the narrow path from expectation to critique, the play deconstructed my every narcissistic trait. It kept me for a full 8 hours from flinching backward into the self that eats, reads, watches, and buys tickets to things, or does so vicariously through the devices that pad out my existence. The play effortlessly thwarts “modernity,” that vicious disease from which the present always seems to be suffering. Fitzgerald’s prose is most of the reason why. What ERS failed to do when they brought The Select to New York (which was astonishing at Princeton, but flat and dull and over-performed in New York) is that they’ve managed through the play’s entire run to, quite brilliantly, stay the fuck out of the text’s way.
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