Yi-sheng and I got a chance to interview the director of Gatz, John Collins, at the cafe at the library@esplanade, along with people from Youth.sg. He was really lovely to talk to and was obliging when we asked to take the mandatory groupie photo. More questions and responses after the excerpt…
Youth.sg reporter: How did the idea for Gatz come about?
It started a long time ago, when somebody in the company who really liked this book had the idea that we should make some kind of play about it. We didn’t know what we wanted to do with it so we thought, let’s just read it. Our first idea was to edit it down, make it shorter. We noticed there was a first person narrator, and we tried to decide which of his words could stay and which needed to go, but we just couldn’t decide — we just liked it all so much. This novel was written perfectly and we couldn’t improve on it, so we got this idea that we should do the whole thing.
We didn’t think it would work — we thought that it was going to be too long. But we did three to four chapters at one time, and just kept working, and we realized we could do the whole thing if we put the breaks in the right places. So it was a long experiment that we didn’t know would work when we had started out.
Yi-sheng and I have a chat with John Collins
Youth.sg: What were some of the challenges in coming up with the production?
The main challenge at first was deciding how we should frame it. We had to present some reason for this to be happening — we didn’t want to just stage it as a normal production where everyone comes out in costume and there’s a set from the first chapter. We needed a way into it.
We were having some very early rehearsals in an office and we thought, let’s just use this office as a found set. I had an idea from there that it would be a play about someone reading the book, and he would begin to see the book around him as he read. After that, the challenges were just about deciding how to move back and forth between these two worlds: the world of this dirty office and the world of the novel. Sometimes, he just reads and sometimes, the scene is completely staged with costumes, drinks and music…
Youth.sg: The characters in the play develop into the characters of The Great Gatsby. How do you get the audience to see this development?
At the beginning, it’s ambiguous. I don’t want to give too much away – there aren’t many surprises — but it’s through coincidences. You hear the narrator read about someone walking in and closing a door, then someone walks into the office and closes in the door.
We looked for little ways to do this, especially at the beginning as it starts to happen. It happens slowly and that’s the way the novel works too, because it is a novel and not a play. It moves slowly in the beginning and then it just accelerates and moves faster and faster.
ME: How far do the contextual aspects of Gatsby’s story influence the action in Gatz?
Completely in some parts. The whole show is this balancing act between just going in and doing physically everything that the novel indicates: Myrtle walks in and she’s changed into a dress that looks a certain way; actor walks offstage and she’s wearing the dress; people are pouring drinks…And there are other parts where none of it happens. Everyone sits very still and Scott just reads it. We had a rhythm about when we should allow the novel to exist in the audience’s imagination and when we should show them things. I didn’t want to show them too much, because I didn’t want to lose the idea that this is still a novel, and we wanted it to survive intact. So sometimes, I wanted people to experience it as nothing but words.
The light and the sound are a big part of how the space gets transformed. We’d be deep in the staging of one scene, then somebody would turn the light switch on and we’re back in the office. We had to be careful not to go too far from that strange office where everybody’s always there. We’ve been working on it for so long and we’re still finding little ways of making connections between the two worlds. I love the idea of having this space where the novel is becoming real. It’s not so much a space where the audience assumes it to be real from the beginning. None of it’s real… it’s always becoming.
ME: How have you conceptualized the narrator in Gatz?
I think of him as an exaggerated example of someone’s imagination getting the best of him. He thinks he’s just noticing the coincidences at first but his imagination of what he’s reading takes over. It’s this big involuntary hallucination and it’s like a children’s story. It’s really just his imagination that’s doing it all, but he feels it’s all happening to him. It’s like The Lion The Witch And The Wardrobe — you walk through a door and it’s all real. He experiences a kind of transformation which mirrors the ideas and actions of the novel of people wanting to become someone else. He’s no longer this guy in an office; he becomes a character in this book.
It’s been an interesting exercise for that actor because he’s memorized the entire book. I knew he’d be a good actor for that part because he has that capability, but he has to pretend to be reading it the whole time. It’s the opposite from what usually happens in a regular rehearsal: during the rehearsal, he won’t use the book and it’s his only opportunity to show people that he knows the whole thing. It’s a brilliant exercise — he has to pretend he’s reading it for the first time, and he has to take himself to a place where he doesn’t know the text.
ME: What are some aspects of the book that you find yourself bringing out in Gatz?
I guess what I want people to get from it is that it’s not just about the Jazz Age, but it’s a very compelling story that could be happening right now. Most of the adaptations that you see want to make it all about the costumes and the cars and the music. We have some costumes and we have some music – we don’t have any cars – but I kind of enjoy stripping away all those details which people associate with the book and just get to the words. The style of the writing is the best thing about this book, better than the story itself.
ME: You’re transposing two different mediums. Has dramatising this reading of The Great Gatsby changed your notion of reading or how you do theatre?
It’s made me a better reader. Understanding all these different layers of the novel has made me a more curious reader. It’s had a profound effect on the kind of theatre we’ve been making as a company. We’re a company who has been around for 20 years, but for the first 10 years, we weren’t using text very much. After we did this show, I became very interested in great writing. I’ve done two more plays based on novels written during the same period of time, the 1920s. This was an important period in American writing because these writers were writing in a voice that sounds very much like the way people speak now. So when you hear the language out loud from these novels, it feels very close but very distant at the same time. I got an appreciation of the literature of the period because of Gatz and a deeper understanding of text in theatre.
YS: What were the two novels that you adapted?
After we did Gatz, we did William Faulkner’s The Sound And The Fury and right now, we’re working on Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises.
ME: Were the creative processes of these productions similar to the ones in Gatz?
In some ways, but I didn’t want to do the same thing again. I wanted to work with that writing but I wanted to prove to myself that this system wouldn’t work on just any novel. When we chose The Sound And The Fury, we chose a very difficult part of it to do: the first section where there were all these memories out of order. I wanted a different set of challenges and a different set of problems. I love the fact that a novel gives me a problem to start with — that it’s not designed for the stage.
With The Sound And The Fury, the problem was how to deal with the time- shifting. And now with The Sun Also Rises, I want to do the entire book but just lift the dialogue out of it. I think The Great Gatsby is special because it took so well to having it done in its entirety. This is definitely not working with the Hemingway and it needs a different solution.
The one thing that all three productions have in common is that we’re only using the words of the author. In the case of The Sun Also Rises, I’m looking for a play that exists somewhere inside that novel, whereas with The Great Gatsby, I decided that the novel was a play and we’d do all of it. I’m treating them as a trilogy, but it all started with Gatz.
YS: And you don’t feel bad about only doing novels by dead white men?
(laughs) We thought about that when we were choosing — did we want to just do the dead white men? When I was thinking about them wanting to be of a piece, it made sense. They’re not just three dead white men; they’re dead white men who wrote at almost the same time… they all knew each other and they had the same editors and agents. I didn’t want us to become the theatre company that just did novels. I wanted to do a trilogy of novels and have them all related to each other.
I wanted to do Flannery O’Connor — a dead white woman (laughs) — but it was very difficult to get the rights to do it. I wanted to work on a novel from a writer from the South – that’s where I’m from — which was why we did Faulkner. That’s a good point, and it’s not an accident. I think the next thing we’ll do might probably be from someone who’s living, but we’ll see.
ME: Has “Gatz” changed much over the five years?
The basic structure hasn’t changed, but because I’ve stayed with it this whole time, I get new ideas. One example that comes to mind is the change we made after we‘ve been working on it for a year. He’ s leaving a party late at night, a car crashes into a wall and we hear this offstage. But then I thought, we should see a tyre roll by the door. We fill it out with these small details.
Because the actors have become so familiar with their individual roles, they’re able to do so much more with them. The more time they spend with them, the more they understand the meaning of each thing they are saying. There’s not a line which they don’t deeply understand. That’s not always the case if you rehearse a play for 3 weeks then perform it — you don’t get the opportunity to understand the meaning of everything you say.
YS: Where’s the show been taken to? Only English-speaking countries?
It’s been to many countries where English is not the first language. We did it in Brussels, in Amsterdam, in Zurich, in Norway, Lisbon, Vienna. We’ve also done it in Ireland and Australia and then some places in the United States that weren’t New York: Seattle, Minneapolis, Portland, Philadelphia. Some places we would use supertitles — not for the whole thing — but now and then, we would project a summary if we thought people wouldn’t understand. It’s finally going to go to New York in the fall because we’ve gotten the rights to do it.
YS: Has it gone down well with students?
It has. We’ve performed in Boston in January and February this year for five weeks and we had a lot of students, because it’s a popular novel to read in high school. But the response I’ve been most interested in is the adults who hadn’t read it since they were 16 and have forgotten it, or those who remember it through the movies. It’s exciting when people who haven’t read it for years and years come to see the show, and they think, ‘I forgot that this is such a good book.’
ME: Besides these text-based dramas, what other kinds of productions does Elevator Repair Service come up with?
We were formed around the idea that we would make shows as company, as an ensemble. Everything we do starts with a group of people, and we find the material that we want to work on, so that’s taken on a lot of different forms. We do a lot of work with dance. Gatz is an exception in this way because there isn’t any dance, and we usually do a lot of choreography.
Generally, we like to find things that aren’t meant to be on stage and translate them. So sometimes, we’ll find a bit of video and create a dance out of it. It’s always about translating things — passing them through the filter of our actors and putting them on stage. I like for things to present us with problems we have to solve, and I think that’s why we haven’t really done a play. We will do a play sooner or later, but we like things that are problematic, because that gives us something fun to work on.
YS: Is there anything you want to tell the people of Singapore? Any message to them?
We’re very happy to be here. Thank you for having us. I guess the show itself is what I have to say, so I hope we get plenty of people.
Some people might see the show as a scary thing because it’s 7-8 hours long, but if people are skeptical about it in the beginning when they come, it makes their experience of taking that leap of faith much more enjoyable. I’m always scared that people will be skeptical, but in the end it always makes me a little surprised that they want to stay for the whole thing.
May Ee Wong
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