DESCRIPTION WITHOUT PLACE.
criticism. decorum. innards. bric-a-brac. nostalgia. nausea. polemics. diatribes. litanies. symphonies. polaroids.
Email
Images
Hobby
AX
-
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.
-
“For the sake of art, it was his preposterous ambition to translate himself from a Boston banker into a genius. He studied genius-hood as his friends studied the conventions, or contract bridge, and he decided, with terrible calculation, to short cut his way to genius by way of madness. Harry Crosby is an entire laboratory wherein may be studied the terminal consequences of the religion of art. Almost alone among the outlaw artists of his time, he translated every aesthetic notion - so long as it was sufficiently wayward, outre, and violent - into acts. In his life he lived a dangerous metaphor: Art is magic. The magician is a god.”
-Geoffrey Wolff, Black Sun: The Brief Transit and Violent Eclipse of Harry Crosby.
loading…
