And So We Ramble On: Barely Assembled Thoughts on ‘Gatsby: An American Myth'

The underbelly of joie de vivre, in Welch’s Gatsby, is fear. Fear pervades the entire text: fear of aging, and of not growing up, fear of missing out, of losing something or someone or oneself, fear of never having found oneself at all, fear of both change and permanence. This relentless fear is what drives most of the debauchery, decadence, and sex and it expands brilliantly from Nick Carraway’s love of life to Myrtle Wilson’s unwillingness to barely survive.

On the Sound of this World:

In researching other thoughts on this production, with many pointing to their own discomfort with the un-conventional sound of the music. Of course, as in anything, there are some that hold the opposite opinion expressing, like I am about to do, enthusiasm for the musical language Welch and Bartlett developed in telling this story. Having no fervourous alliance to the sound of Florence + the Machine and only a passing knowledge of the style Welch’s songwriting, I believe much of the approach to the material spans from the sound of the music which is thematicall resonant. The non-traditional sound emphasizes the cultural break of nouveau-riche, post-war, and post-pandemic world of the 1920s youth culture, approximating that seemingly distant world to our own. This music has the sound of modern joie de vivre - it is half-decadent and rhythmic and disproportionate honest and so very reminiscent of being fogily drunk dancing at a college party. This music details a story about fastly-degenerating youth and the nostalgia for the recent past - and because of that, this sound feels like the most appropriate way to drive this story: the sound of the last decade: popular, fresh and yet so familiar. 

On Book, Themes, and Aspects of Adaptation:

This production approaches ‘Gatsby’ as a post-apocalyptic narrative – it asks of us what can and should we do now that the world has ended. Majok’s reading of the novel is tinted by the experience of the story in a world of uncertainties regarding individual life as well as of society - forever self-searching in a pandemic-ridden, war-infused world. In Majok and Welch’s 1922, time is both ever-moving and suspended - in which tomorrow and the day after and the next 30 years are both unquestionable marks of difference and a recurring, suspended same. This paradoxism of time is, then, redirected to a matter of class – for the Buchanans and the old money, time is only relative, indirect and inconsequential (where actions can be aleviated if not undone), while for the working class, time is a matter of deterioration and hope change -both the advertisement of the American Dream nd the great bearer of struggle- will not take a darker turn. Thus, Gatsby assumes the role of the one who blindly buys into the advertisement of time: the arduous belief that we can make time, buy time, and even restore it –that power can be made and shared.

Even if shackled to the symbols of the original prose, this production does minimize their presence in favor of something else –a substitution that would work if the changed metaphors  did not fail to capture the same allure and directedness of Fitzgerald’s symbolism. While the language of the novel seems incoherent with contemporary sensibilities, there is a power and undeniable structural necessity of some of that language. Majok’s book fails mostly when it tries to simply alter the surface, the lingo of the novel, and settles for bringing the old in a new form without a justification for it. At best, it is an alteration of the fabric of the novel - a purging of symbols to create new ones from the space in between Fitzgerald’s lines. The middle ground in which some of the text rests now is too muddy, nearing success while never quite achieving it – making it a more frustrating experience than if it had not chosen that middle ground at all. 

The book is ambitious. In fact, the entire production is ambitious and one cannot but revere the courage of its creatives to deconstruct and reconstruct such an iconic and misread narrative. Yet, in its ambition, it fails to stick the landing all of the time – which is not to say it fails as an adaptation, but that it has the possibility, in its unknown future, of being a great one. The handful of thematic concerns seem less streamlined than the production seems to require and all are faced by Majok’s pen and Nick’s eye with such fervor that it occasionally borders on melodrama. The stronger narrative nuances are sometimes lost to favor the lesser ones, and the over-theatrical can be misattributed at times. 

And yet, Majok finds new life in the world of the story: hers is a world that constantly shifts in scope to different levels of success. At its core, this world is broken and so is the way the narrative eye (not always Nick Carraway) meanders through it. The book does not make clear if its world is made of individuals or masses, and it often swings violently from one scope to another leaving the audience with the feeling that something is either missing or misplaced.

On Direction and Design:

This project seems like the perfect continuation of the thematic concerns detailed in the rest of Chavkin’s career. The director, forever enamored with the secret affair between history and mythology, here finds a one-man embodiment of her inquiries in Gatsby. The world and setting of this story are somewhere between Great Comet’s broken luxury and Hadestown’s earnest struggle. In Gatsby, Chavkin evolves her exploration of “dancing at the edge of the abyss” –now directly exploring why we dance and not just plummeting the audience into a world with no other choice besides dancing. This setting shares much of the same DNA with Chavkin’s other worlds, an inherently broken place where people look for an impossible sense of unity –through love, sex, purchase, and/or reformation. The merging of bodies (beautifully encaptured by Sonya Tayeh’s choreography) mirrors a desire for a merging of interests and equality that never comes. Gatsby too, is made into a circular tragedy - we dip into the story with Nick’s arrival in New York and leave the story with his return to the Midwest, which together with Majok’s book, paints the picture of Gatsby not as an exceptional individual’s story, but the narrative of a nation.

I see Powell’s portrayal of Gatsby, as the direct result of Chavkin’s meticulous direction and interest in character-symbols. In this production, the character played by Powell is a layered persona, one that at its core is ordinary. The lack of grandiosity in him is, I believe, the point reflected in the approach of the book, structure, and title of the musical: Gatsby is a fiction, and only because he is a fiction he can be great. Gatsby is a mythology, the stuff of greatness, but the actual man can never be a living fiction. In this, Gatsby is a mere advertisement of greatness to the people who populate the stage, while we the audience see through the facade, into the boy who cannot fully accept he is a man, the one who struggled but is portrayed by others as a king. This disconnection is the source of argument against Powell’s interpretation of Gatsby and yet, I believe, the musical comes quite close to making that contradiction, and that character, work. 

This disconnect between the irreconcilable extremes found and embodied by Gatsby infects and the worldbuilding of this production. Thematically, the co-existence of extreme poverty and extreme wealth, and the very concept of inequality at the core of the American experience are evident not only in the book but in design. Mimi Lien’s set design forces those contradictions together to successful albeit sometimes awkward results. The stage, populated by staircases and broken and distorted car parts has, in theory, the poetic essence of Fitzgerald’s prose, but it is sometimes interrupted by temporary set pieces that break the beautiful abstraction on the stage. The design, brilliant in both theory and some of its practice, seems a bit unsure in its capacity of telling this story and proceeds to add more and more external elements to the point of losing its initial symbolic power. The biggest trouble the design faces is to create the various backdrops required by the narrative and thus it sometimes fails in either fully severing or integrating the visual identity of some locations – I am thinking especially of Gatsby’s mansion and the Valley of the Ashes. While the lighting design (Alan C. Edwards) does a great job of building environemants out of the set pieces, it sometimes edges on the excessive, to the benefit of some scenes and the detriment of others. 

On Performance and Its Audience:

This is a story about finding oneself on the edge of youthfulness, and this production casts its characters accordingly – a rare feat in the Gatsby adaptations terrain. For the first time watching an adaptation of The Great Gatsby, I felt like these characters as real people rather than fiction. The casting for this production, in my opinion, is exceptional across the board and it further proves the level of ingenuity and critical thinking exerted by the creatives over the original text and the thematic priorities of this production. The narrative weight of having such young characters bear the shackles of a lost generation furthers the tragedy in the story and further emphasizes the effects of war, poverty, sickness, and loss in the politics and daily life of the world.

In Ben Levi Ross and Solea Pfeiffer, this production finds its strongest players – regarding the material given to them in comparison to the source and the meticulous approach to building the story as character studies by both book and direction. Charlotte MacInnes and Cory Jeacoma bring unexpected and much-needed depth to their portrayals of the Buchanans, offering truth in the artifice-filled world they inhabit. In the ensemble, the production finds its tool for world-building and metaphorical power – the all-seeing ensemble fitting into the role of T.J. Eckelberg so fittingly that when the famous imagery of the novel appeared on stage for a single scene I was thrown back. The cast builds in their performance such power that throughout the performance one feels less and less familiar with the novel and ready to embrace whatever new narrative is happening on the stage. 

I truly hope this production continues to have a life elsewhere. Having left A.R.T.’s Loeb Drama Center with a knot in my throat and a couple of tears in my eyes, I felt a million ideas rushing through my head, and little scribbled notes in my brain. It took me a handful of days to fully encompass my thoughts and opinions on the production and I cannot wait to see its next iteration stretch its arms further… And one fine evening—