A Spellbinding Six-Hour Gatz
Scott Brown
October 6, 2010: The culture’s currently crawling with Gatsbyesque figures, from the silicon ciphers of The Social Network to the “self-made” congressional candidates of the tea party. But anyone seeking this generation’s true second coming of the late, great James Gatz should take a trip to the Public Theater and see Gatz, a complete, six-hour-plus recitation/re-creation of The Great Gatsby, American literature’s enduring touchstone, as well as its fetishized golden calf. Gatz’s architects, the rightly revered downtown theater collective Elevator Repair Service, treat it like scripture, reading it end to end. That they do so with lusty irony takes nothing away from the holiness of their literary mission — in fact, it enhances it, exfoliating great gaudy barnacles of accumulated Gatsby kitsch, and forcing a reassessment of our deepest beliefs about ourselves, our culture, our most treasured illusions, literary and otherwise.
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