Review Roundup: GATZ Returns Off-Broadway at The Public Theater

Reviews are in for the New York City encore production of Elevator Repair Service’s GATZ directed by John Collins at The Public Theater, running now through December 1. Read what the critics had to say below!

Ahead of the centennial of The Great Gatsby’s publication and more than a decade after its original Obie and Lortel Award-winning engagements, Elevator Repair Service’s GATZ returns to The Public for a thrilling and final New York City encore of the acclaimed production. One morning in the office of a mysterious small business, an employee finds a copy of The Great Gatsby in the clutter of his desk. He starts to read it out loud and doesn’t stop. At first his coworkers hardly notice. But after a series of strange coincidences, it’s no longer clear whether he’s reading the book, or the book is transforming him.

Told over a single 6 1/2-hour production created by Elevator Repair Service and directed by Elevator Repair Service Artistic Director John Collins, GATZ is not a retelling of the Gatsby story but an enactment of the entire novel. Fitzgerald’s American masterpiece is delivered word for word, startlingly brought to life by a low-rent office staff amid their inscrutable business operations. An event not to be missed and a last chance to see this theatrical and literary tour de force by one of the American theater’s most exciting and inventive companies.

Michael Sommers, New York Stage Review: Gatz is a once-in-a-lifetime event that will scarcely appeal to every taste, but it is likely to be an extraordinary experience for ardent lovers of novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald and The Great Gatsby, and for imaginative theatergoers willing and able to appreciate the atmospheric magic generated by this remarkable production.

David Finkle, New York Stage Review: The true magnificence of this approach to a stage adaptation is its scrupulous inclusion of the full text. Standard stage adaptations eliminate most of an author’s descriptive prose. This one doesn’t, honoring Fitzgerald’s irresistible powers. For only one instance of innumerable heart-throbbing instances he writes: “Gatsby indicated a gorgeous orchid of a woman who sat in state under a white-palm tree.” Eternal thanks, ERS.

Juan A. Ramirez, Theatrely: Gatz reaches, by design, the level of sublimity which other plays happily stumble into. It is a work of genius which quietly announces the depths of its unspeakable beauty, and the profundity of its journey, by the broken table clock facing the audience. When one faces art so directly, so boldly and so openly, time truly stands still.

Average Rating: 93.3%