Your bold reporters.
Six and a half hours of theater? Yes, please. Our intrepid writers braved a play that involves an actor speaking the entire text of Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. Here, Beatrice Smigasiewicz and Reina Hardy log their experience with the Elevator Repair Service's production of "Gatz," playing for just one weekend at the Museum of Contemporary Art.
PRE-SHOW
1-2:30 p.m.
Reina
In any marathon, preparation is crucial. The show starts at three, so at one, I prepare with a nap. Then I prepare by dressing in a tunic/leggings outfit, because tunic/leggings outfits are like PJs that you can wear out of the house. Finally, I prepare by mainlining a soy chai latte. Bring it, Fitzgerald!
2:55 p.m.
Reina
I meet Beatrice at press check-in, and we immediately start acting like obnoxious tourists, snapping pictures of each other and the theater. I spot some local actors milling around, and go paparazzi on them.
PART 1
3:06 p.m.
Reina
The show starts a bit late, without fanfare, without even the "turn off your cell phone" announcement. I scramble to put mine on silent as an actor enters a shabby modern office, and tries to turn on a recalcitrant computer. Eventually, he finds a copy of Gatsby and reads the famous opening lines in a monotone. We have lift-off!
3 p.m.
Beatrice
9:40 a.m., reads the clock on the office desk. A man enters a dilapidated office stuck sometime in the early '90s and turns on his computer. Jabs his finger into the keyboard of the yellowed PC and still nothing happens. But that doesn't seem nearly as pressing as the fact that he's got nothing to fill his work hours, nearly seven whole work hours and seven hours of the show. It must be out of boredom that he comes across an old copy of The Great Gatsby and starts reading the book in a half-interested drone. Slowly the office staff starts to resemble the characters in the book...
3:17 p.m.
Reina
The show is still essentially an office worker reading a novel out loud. His boss is not as upset about this as one might expect- but then again, none of the other employees seem to be doing any real work.
3:20 p.m.
Reina
Man, Gatsby is a great book. Fitzgerald keeps dropping these prose bombs - clusters of words so indelibly gorgeous that they cause audience members to gasp out loud. Anonymous office worker is starting to transmute into Nick Carraway, jazz-age bond salesman, and serious contender for best first-person narrator in English literature.
3:25 p.m.
Beatrice
I turn off my cell phone, leaving myself without a clock. I still can't decide whether the book fills up his work hours at the office or if it stops time completely but one thing is certain, the clock on stage never moves past 9:40 a.m. This little slip in time can't be a coincidence. Fitzgerald has always surrounded himself with clocks, and even when he wrote he was always eager to know how much time was passing. I have been preparing myself for this the entire week and to my surprise, it seems like a lot of others have been, too. The theater is all full, rows and rows and not a gap between. The scene seems a little slow-moving at first and I am only half-listening to the reading. The clock still reads 9:40 a.m. – I will use this as my timer from now on.
3:30 p.m.
Reina
We have our first moment of genuine theatricality! The show has crept up at a truly novelistic pace - but now we're in it, with the office workers taking on characters in the novel and speaking their lines. I immediately wonder who's going to be Gatsby.
3:45 p.m.
Reina
Suddenly, I notice the background noise has shifted from urban static to something more scenically appropriate: Long Island summer-night birdsong. All of the objects on the set seem capable of transformation now, like they might suddenly become anything the story needs them to be.
9:40 a.m.
Beatrice
The audience is an unusually well-behaved group. I have hardly seen a person move, or even so much as budge an elbow. At most, the audience engages in quiet habits of excessive nail-biting, rolling and unrolling of the theater program and the classic stance, sulking with a neat droop of the head that from far away resembles a kind of resigned thinking-man's pose. That one is by far my favorite. After more than two hours of nearly motionless sitting, I seem to be the only person dying for a bathroom break.
3:56 p.m.
Reina
Out of office detritus and really smart lighting, Elevator Repair Service creates the famous image of Gatsby on the dock, looking towards the green light. It's so beautiful that I nearly sob.
4:15 pm.
Reina
I have kind of a crick in my neck. If I ignore it, maybe it will go away.
4:26 p.m.
Reina
Beatrice leaves for some reason. Wuss.
4:40 p.m.
Reina
I notice that the stage clock reads 9:40.
4:45 p.m.
Reina
Gatsby makes his first speaking appearance! Just like in the book, he's present before you quite realize who he is. He's big, with a thick voice and a heavy brow, and I think I love him a little already.
Chicago Off-Loop Theatre Stars! They're just like us! They need coffee during seven-hour plays, too!
End of chapter three. Ten-minute break and the line for water and snacks stretches almost as far as the line for coat check. They are out of coffee and I am given a bag of peanut butter cookies to stop asking. I haven't seen anyone leave yet, but the theater is getting colder and colder. Both Reina and I are now in our jackets. Reina is doing back stretches, and the elderly couple behind us finds this really amusing. They giggle and ask her questions. My stomach's been growling for some time now, though the only person who could have heard was Reina and she says she heard nothing.
5:20 p.m.
Reina
The line for cookies and coffee is full of the desperate. I take a cautionary bathroom trip. You can never be too safe, Beatrice.
PART 2
5:25 p.m.
Reina
I begin to experience serious back/shoulder issues. Is something wrong with that clock?
9:40 a.m.
Beatrice
I forget to write. Gatsby's triumphant exclamation sometime after chapter three, "of course you can repeat the past," brings back his long-gone romance with Daisy, but to me it sounds like a sad realization that he still hasn't been able to move on. A moment for the Gatz.
6 p.m.? Maybe?
Reina
I'm so into this. We're spinning through the most delirious, romantic part of the book and I'm starting to feel Fitzgerald-drunk. I forget to check the time or take notes.
Bea loads up on food for the remaining four hours.
6:45 p.m.
Reina
Your hungry correspondents get a fairly decent box lunch as part of our press package. I do a little yoga in my leggings, and jump up and down. I feel psyched; the second wind is coming on!
9:40 a.m.
Beatrice
Reina's back problems return. We are munching down our complimentary veggie sandwiches cozied in the corner of the MCA's spiraling staircase. Reina is stretching her back in something that looks like a combination of a downward dog and something from "Flashdance." Either way, she does splits in-between her dinner bites and proves she is agile enough to handle both at the same time. There is some chatter about Shakespeare and young girls when she meets an old friend of hers, and I wander off, venturing to the MCA exhibition of a Jenny Holzer project.
7:46 p.m.
Reina
About 15 minutes before the curtain of a normal show, and we've already seen over three hours of theater. I expected some audience attrition, but the place actually seems fuller.
7:50 p.m.
Reina
Beatrice, after reading a review of a previous production, manages to spoil an important theatrical device that's coming in the last act. Dude! How do you spoil an adaptation of the GREAT GATSBY?
9:40 a.m.
Beatrice
When I get back inside Reina accuses me of ruining what she calls a "theatrical moment" (which I will not say here). We both notice that the audience seems to have grown in size quite a bit.
The audience sticks it out after the dinner break.
7:55 p.m.
Reina
The clock now reads two-thirty, and Gatsby is wearing a pink suit. Clearly some kind of sea-change has taken place.
9:40 a.m.
Beatrice
There seems to be some problem with the clocks...It's a theatrical device...
8:05 p.m.
Reina
Fitzgerald writes such amazingly realistic drunk party-talk. It kind of makes me want to be drunk.
8:13 p.m.
Reina
The clock wasn't fixed. It was just upside down.
8:20 p.m.
Reina
We hit that one segment about Gatsby and Daisy that everyone remembers, with the "unutterable visions" and the "perishable breath," and it actually makes me pant, as if I've just had a transcendent sexual experience. Good stuff, Fitzgerald!
8:50 p.m.
Reina
We just hit a Proposition Eight reference. Very up-to-the-minute for a 1920s novel.
9:40 a.m.
Beatrice
Last 10-minute break. I sneak out for some air, feeling a bit heavy with plot. Outside I run into Sarah, a graduate of the University of London's School of Dramaturgy. She tells me she had stopped acting, and came tonight for something a little different than theater; she begged her friends to come with her but somehow everyone mixed up the dates. She got tickets but it was too late for her friends; everything was sold out already. So tonight she's alone and seeing that she's very friendly, right away tells me what she likes most about the play. "They're not character-acting at all; there is no need to be "in" character or to "become" the character."
Still 9:40 a.m.
Beatrice
She walks away and I think what is most enjoyable about the play is that the play is more of a reading or maybe that the reading is more of a play. Either way, I have never been able to sit in one place for so long and be perfectly unaware of just how much time is passing between my coming and going. It feels like no time at all. Outside the theater people are grabbing more coffee and before I get a chance to stand in line I am told again that coffee has run out. A kind staff member hands me a complimentary water and a cookie to keep me going through the last stretch.
9:24 p.m.
Reina
Coming back with my jerry-rigged mocha (packaged cocoa plus brewed coffee), I note that we are about 20 minutes behind the posted schedule. My neck is screaming, but I don't mind. The end is in sight.
PART 4
9:50 p.m.
Reina
A woman behind me whispers "OH, Daisy was driving." Excellent detective work there, but in theaters we say those things in our inside-of-the-head voice.
10:20 p.m.
Reina
This story is so sad.
9:40 a.m.
Beatrice
Gatz on stage in all pink. The tension is the room is rising. I don't want to write anything at all. Reina is on my left, she seems completely engrossed in what's going on the stage, she's leaning forward and holding her notebook feebly. I don't think either of us writes another word 'til the end of the show.
10:39 p.m.
Reina
Nick gives us a lovely description of Chicago trains at Christmas-time, and we are reminded that, despite the East Coast setting, all of the major characters in Gatsby are Midwesterners. The audiences winces in recognition and muddled pride.
10:49 p.m.
Reina
We hit the even-more-famous end lines, and the cast comes out for three curtain calls. You guys, that poor man playing Nick has been talking for six hours straight. Let him get home and drink his tea!
9:40 a.m.
Beatrice
There are two reasons people give standing ovations. One, because it seems to them that the actors or rather talented youngsters are an especially promising bunch. The other, which seems at first to be the more obvious reason, but which is also the more rare one, is because the show in its totality is a success in all aspects.
What we look like after seven hours of theater.
Reina
We stumble out into what Nick Carraway calls "my middle-west," downtown Chicago with the "chatter of frozen breath," the street lamps, and the readily available public transportation. Phrases from the novel still ring in my ears. I'm in a total F. Scott mood: ready to go home, get drunk and write.
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