Adelaide festival | The Guardian: A man enters his office in the morning, finds his computer on the fritz and, after a few attempts to turn it on and off again, comes across a copy of F Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel The Great Gatsby. So he starts to read and when his colleagues enter they find themselves taking on the characters, and soon the novel unfolds around us, word by word. The New York theatre company Elevator Repair Service has produced a work that is not quite adaptation – given it doesn’t really adapt the novel at all – but that is utterly transfixing nonetheless.
2 comments:
I find it very interesting the choice to make any kind of live performance so long, so I assume it must be incredibly strong choices made to justify this decision. It seems as if the political take on Gatsby is a very strong choice to criticize the untra-wealthy, the ruling class that doesn’t care, which I again find very interesting to focus on in such a long production because of the privilege it takes to gain proper access to a performance of this nature. I don’t mean just literally getting a ticket, but additionally having the leisure time to see such a long production. To work an entire day around seeing theater is also a privilege, and I assume with such a large production, a hefty ticket price initially. This message is then going exactly to those who need it. I’m also interested in this choice of production length because of the current “standard” attention span being so short. Or at least, that’s what we are told- we have short attention spans. Whenever I see live productions I challenge this idea, I find it really refreshing. Perhaps our attention spans aren’t entirely deteriorated, and perhaps there are ways to claim the attention of the upper class with art, and perhaps there is hope to educate them.
I have been thinking about this production ALL WEEK since I read this article last weekend. What must their contracts look like! How do performers (or audience for that matter) eat or drink water or go to the bathroom? Are there intermissions? A 3 hour show is already a battle but an 8 hour reading straight from the book The Great Gatsby?! That’s a marvel. I love theater like this that truly pushes the bound (for better and worse) as to what theater can be. And what an interesting costume to set it in an office building and turn traditional character casting on its head. In my opinion this is a much more effective and inspiring concept than the broadway musical version which feels like the Disney channel spinoff of a classic, nuanced novel. I wish I could have seen this production. There are so many great stories that struggle to fit into our limited attention spans and economical three hour cap on live theater. Shows like this and the Globe’s two part Henry the VIth or City theater’s three year installment of Christmas at Pemberly are making great strides to redefine the time bounds of theater as a time-based medium.
Post a Comment