'Gatsby' leaps from the page to Rep stage

"Art for art's sake" is a concept with multiple meanings. In Seattle just now, one of those meanings stands out. The art of theater can be of service to the art of narrative fiction -- and vice versa.

Last week, Intiman Theatre premiered an adaptation of Richard Wright's 1940 novel "Native Son," a frightening story that raises crisscrossing questions about race, poverty and misogyny. According to Intiman's adaptor/director Kent Gash, "The point is to get Richard Wright's work out in front of the public again."

And then there's Book-It Repertory Theatre, a Seattle institution of 16 years standing. Book-It's stock in trade is stage adaptations of superior fiction. The company, according to co-artistic director Myra Platt, was "founded on the belief that literature as theater could directly affect the literacy rate in King County as well as create new plays for the American theater. Our audiences continue to grow, and each year we do better than the previous year."

And now another theater company, Seattle Repertory Theatre, enters the page-to-stage picture. "The Great Gatsby" opens at the Rep on Wednesday. Artistic director David Esbjornson staged this adaptation's premiere at the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis last summer. Esbjornson's views on turning novels into play scripts are similar to those of Platt and Gash.

"I would like audiences to have an experience that may allow them to fall in love with the genius of F. Scott Fitzgerald's prose," Esbjornson said in a recent interview. "And it's important for us to know about Fitzgerald's analysis of the American Dream."

As portrayed and analyzed in "The Great Gatsby," that dream is mostly a nightmare. Though the milieu is genteel, the takes on class and race are similar to those in "Native Son."

Fitzgerald's narrator, Nick Carraway, 30, is beguiled and repelled by wealth, glamour and status as manifested in the early 1920s on the gilded north shore of Long Island.

Among the beachfront mansions there is one belonging to Jay Gatsby, a fabulously rich and mysterious bachelor. Gatsby is as beguiled as Carraway by the mystique of materialism, but he is not one bit repelled.

Across a bay from the Gatsby estate is a mansion belonging to Tom and Daisy Buchanan. Gatsby idolizes Daisy, a young society goddess. Tom expresses, and maybe even feels, contempt for Gatsby. The triangle is a quadrangle if you count Tom's slutty mistress.

What at first seems like an Edith Wharton or Henry James report on upper-crust life becomes a tragedy, related by the morbidly fascinated Carraway.

Fitzgerald was born in St. Paul in 1896. The Guthrie Theatre premiered Los Angeles playwright Simon Levy's adaptation of "Gatsby" to celebrate the centennial of Fitzgerald's birth and to inaugurate the company's new $125 million home beside the Mississippi River.

"I had to read 'The Great Gatsby' when I was in the 10th grade," says Esbjornson. "I couldn't get into it. I complained to my teacher and he said, 'Do me a favor. Just read another 20 pages. If you still can't get interested, I'll assign you something else.' So I went back to 'The Great Gatsby.' And, really, 10 pages later I became enthralled and ended up loving the book."

Like Esbjornson in the 10th grade, many people have to persevere to get into "The Great Gatsby." There's a lot of genealogy and geography to slog through at the beginning -- who is related to whom, what they all look like, where they live, and what their houses look like. That business is particularly reminiscent of Wharton and James. Then the action starts.

"Fitzgerald takes no prisoners," Esbjornson says. "No one comes off well. And it's not just the rich are bad, the poor are good. By the end, you may not like all the characters but you feel for them, you understand their pain and disillusionment."

"For the stage, you distill, you get to the essence," Esbjornson reassures. "Our show is only about two hours long with intermission."

The Rep and Intiman, both of which have won Excellence in Regional Theatre Tony Awards, are the major big deals in the Seattle stage ecology. Book-It is more what you'd call a "midsize" enterprise. Book-It's Platt does not resent, however, big deals poaching on her little territory. She expresses the hope that audiences will "find their way from 'Native Son' and 'The Great Gatsby' to our productions of Dickens' 'A Tale of Two Cities' and Isabel Allende's 'The House of the Spirits.' "

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