Gatz – Elevator Repair Service

by Mieke Zijlmans

There is really only one reason I can think of not to go immediately to Gatz, now that the performance is right here in Amsterdam. And that is the unlikely event that you don’t understand English at all. If you do, then this performance is an absolute must. The actors from the New York group Elevator Repair Service speak very clearly, so the English is quite doable.

Long ago it was customary among adults to read entire books aloud. That is in fact what Gatz is: a performance in which a whole book is read out loud, and none other than the 1925 classicThe Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940), a tragic epic centered around the magnificently rich and equally mysterious figure of Jay Gatsby, seen through the eyes of the narrator, Nick (Scott Shepherd).

Under the direction of John Collins, Elevator Repair Service places the book in a quasi-accidental setting: a rundown office, apparently in New York, sometime in the past ten years. Loud street noises, a photo of the Empire State Building on the wall. A computer in the office is not working, and while waiting for a technician to arrive the narrator happens to “find” a copy ofThe Great Gatsby in a box. He starts to read, gets caught up in it, and before long his coworkers take on the roles of characters in Fitzgerald’s novel. Diverse locations are evoked with the aid of splendid sound effects: crickets in the grass, a restaurant, street noises, a rainstorm — these sounds make the situations seem lifelike.

The approach in this six-and-a-half-hour-long reading is distantly reminiscent of what we know in Holland from groups like Discordia and ‘t Barre Land. But those groups play their literary texts with deliberate theatricality, whereas the New York actors perform rather “filmically” — casual and natural, as if they were in real situations. And this has a fantastic and eye-opening effect. Because although the show starts with an intentional awkwardness and difficulty, before long the specator gets swept up in the story.

In the book young Nick moves in the 1920s to the eastern US to try his luck. He works as a bonds dealer in New York but lives outside the city. By chance he ends up renting a house next door to the the estate of Jay Gatsby, a magnificently wealthy, worldly figure about whom the most bizarre rumors are circulating. Gatsby moves in the same fashionable world that Nick’s rich and married cousin Daisy also belongs to.

Gradually a story develops that shows up the contrast between the chic upper class and the everyday ordinary New York of that era just before the crisis of the 1930s. The rich, thinking themselves invulnerable, dance on the volcano, and so bring disaster on themselves. Even the mythic figure of Jay Gatsby does not escape.