Borne back ceaselessly into Gatz

I am wondering about Gatz, the seven hour Gatsby semi-adaptation at the A.R.T. Why did it feel so wholly immersive, despite being so extremely low-fi? Sleep No More and The Donkey Show achieve their immersion through verisimilitude, overwhelming your senses with lush detail. Their voices are full of money. Gatz, with its wafer-thin meta-narrative and commonplace imagery, is barely more than a staged reading. But you are there.

But there is not West Egg. The world of Gatz is not the story-world of The Great Gatsby - it is the world of The Great Gatsby, the novel, the paper-and-ink book with the blue-face cover that you dog-eared in AP English. The immersion is into the very act of reading The Great Gatsby. What engrosses you is the story, but what you experience is the telling of the story, the construction of it; the green twinkle of the perfect language, the careening inevitability of the narrative.

A novel this familiar has deep personal layers to it, separate from and wholly dependent on the actual narrative - and through the familiar text you can repeat the past, old sport. I felt keenly the sense memory of lifting my chin to balance an invisible object, moved to mimicry by the vividness of Jordan's gesture. My friend Cian, raised on the metric system, recalled reading the Plaza scene and first learning the word "quart." Little details... but they are the functional equivalent of the pine scent in Birnam Wood. Sleep No More creates future sense memories - Gatz exposes and explores the memories you already have.

And as such, it is an intensely personal experience. Your memories of reading Gatsby are not mine - though they are likely similar, high school curricula being what they are. The novel is one of the few media that stubbornly resist communal consumption. That's why people react so strongly to deviation in adaptations of favorite novels - they get it wrong, they don't understand, I know the story isn't real but it's still true and you can't just change what's true. (and Gatz was not immune to this effect. Chapter Five was plain wrong.) You can feel ownership over the reading of a novel, over your reading of a novel, because there is no one else there to lay a claim.

The power of live theater is the power of the communal experience, laid bare in Gatz because it was the first time all of us, any of us, had ever experienced this particular familiar story with people. With people. Laughing together, gasping together, feeling like an overgrown spider in the Loeb seats together. It's reading the novel, but amplified. Sleep No More transports you to a world you've only visited in dreams - Gatz is a world of your own creation that is suddenly lived in by others.

The wakening from Sleep No More is well-supported - between Manderley and the long bus ride from the remote location, you can stagger the staggering out of the dream. When Gatz was over, it was over, and there we were, blinking at Harvard Square. But we weren't ready to emerge from that world. Drained emotionally from the story, we wanted to sustain the magic circle of the stage - we didn't want to admit outsiders. Sure, they all had read the book too, they could tut-tut about the Buchanans as well as us - but they weren't there. They didn't understand.

At the large party, Gatsby removed our masks and whispered in our ears.

So we beat on.