THE GREAT GATSBY
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Ignorant as I am, I can’t talk very specifically about how John Carlile’s new stage adaptation compares with Fitzgerald’s original tale about a poor midwestern boy who reinvents himself as a free-spending New York bon vivant. Little hints–something vague and arbitrary, for instance, in Carlile’s treatment of the romance between narrator Nick Carraway and a lady athlete named Jordan Baker–suggest that Fitzgerald probably had a better handle on things like motivation. Still, the stage version has its own virtues, its own distinctions. Like Jim Corti’s choreography, which leads the production at times into a Tempest-like dream world–as if Long Island were Prospero’s rock and Gatsby’s gang of sycophantic revelers were in fact conjured spirits dancing at a decadent, oddly anomic replay of Miranda’s wedding.
One thing I know without having to read the book is that Fitzgerald’s Gatsby is white. Carlile’s is black. Or more accurately, Harry J. Lennix, the cunning and gorgeous actor who plays Carlile’s Gatsby, is black; the character itself retains all the ethnic and social accoutrements of a wealthy white man living in a privileged east-coast enclave during the boom decade of the 1920s.
And the outward sign of his exclusion is Lennix’s dark skin. Think of it as Gatsby’s heart–his inner reality–expressed as pigment. No matter how well he walks or talks or dresses, he can’t possibly finesse this essential, ineradicable distinction between him and the world he’s trying to crash. We know it. We can see it. It’s pretty much written all over his face. The tragedy is that he himself hasn’t a clue.
