REVIEW
This is in no way a period piece in either its production design, or in any attempt to be true to the appearance and style of Fitzgerald’s characters. Quite the opposite. The casting is intentionally all “wrong,” more in keeping with the office workers than in Fitzgerald’s people. Rather than Daisy’s pale blonde demeanor and debutante airs, this Daisy is a much edgier dark-eyed brunette whose affectations seem far more calculated. Daisy’s golf-playing socialite friend Jordan Baker as played by the sassy office girl with street-smart attitude is a bit of stretch. Her tomboy posture and competitiveness mask Jordan’s privileged class ennui. But Tom Buchanan’s blustering boorish antics and exaggerated machismo appropriately played more as nouveau riche vulgarity than old money good breeding is unexpectedly on target. The skinny IT drone who repeatedly collects and returns a faulty computer melds perfectly into Wilson the cuckolded garage mechanic. The production, like the performances, re-situates the narrative in a shifting time/space continuum with multiple points of reference that operate as signs on the road between then and now. The set includes a metal desk with an old-fashioned 1980s era computer monitor and keyboard on it. On the opposite desk sits an immaculate manual typewriter, and in the far corner a young man in headphones is absorbed in his laptop (the actual sound engineer). But in that bleak room stretched across time zones, the frequently checked time on the clock by the computer never advances beyond twenty minutes before ten. When this computer frustratingly refuses to boot up after several attempts, a young man in standard office attire finds a paperback copy of The Great Gatsby in his rolodex. He begins to read aloud, tentatively at first, and then with increasing interest, gradually transforming into Nick Caraway, the novel’s narrator witness. Opposite him, seated at the manual typewriter, is a tall bald laconic man whose terse gestures and self-contained remoteness distinguish him from the others. He is Fitzgerald’s ghost, the writer to Nick’s reader. He is also Gatsby the outsider, the one with secrets to hide. His empty desktop reveals nothing. The lavishness of his mansion covers all. Part of the double entendre here is that he is not the Gatsby of our expectations, but the one seen through the eyes of the reader Nick. The book becomes an escape from the boredom and deadening repetition of the office workers routines. The descriptive nuances of language in the voice of the narrator transport us into Gatsby’s mansion and glitzy parties, the sweltering closeness of the Plaza Hotel room, Myrtle’s seedy NYC apartment, and the site of Wilson’s Queens garage, where we are confronted with the raw
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