This Week Ahead: September 16-22

by Jason Zinoman

The legend of “GATZ” just keeps growing. This six-and-a-half-hour version of “The Great Gatsby,” barred from New York by the F. Scott Fitzgerald estate, has been traveling around the world, earning glowing reviews and an outsize reputation that is almost Gatsby-like. A recent performance in Philadelphia drew a handful of New York critics and experimental theater stars (including Kate Valk) and received no fewer than three standing ovations. What is most surprising about this thrillingly theatrical and moving show, by the New York company Elevator Repair Service, is not just the audaciousness of leaving out not one word of this classic. It’s also the reverence the company shows for the book, an infectious love for Fitzgerald’s poetry that makes you realize the shortcomings of almost every other staged adaptation. And it makes the estate’s refusal to allow the drama to come to New York (there is another, more conventional production that has the rights) all the more regrettable. Still, truly intrepid theater fans can see this event next week if they’re willing to visit the Pacific Northwest, where it is in Portland, Ore., until Sunday, and in Seattle Sept. 21-23.