Gatz

A MAN sits down at a gray metal desk one morning and tries to boot up a computer from the Flintstone age, one with a screen that looks like an old cathode-ray TV set. Nothing happens, so he pulls out a paperback and begins to read aloud. The book is “The Great Gatsby,” but this guy apparently skipped 10th-grade English when it was assigned. He reads slowly, haltingly, stumbling over pronunciations, getting the emphasis all wrong. The last time we heard “Gatsby” read this badly was in the old Andy Kaufman sketch.


This is how “Gatz,” Elevator Repair Service’s seven-hour performance now at the Public Theater, begins. When I saw it last winter, produced by the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Mass., the set was a spectacularly cluttered office that appeared to be part warehouse, part paper-pushing operation and part waiting room — not a bad metaphor, if you think about it, for the inside of your own head. And what goes on in your head is, in a way, the real subject of “Gatz,” which is not, strictly speaking, a staged reading of “The Great Gatsby,” even though every one of the book’s 47,000 words is pronounced onstage. Neither is it a dramatic adaptation of Fitzgerald’s novel. It’s more a dramatization of the act of reading itself — of what happens when you immerse yourself in a book.