RPInsider

As students, one of the benefits we get at EMPAC are discounted tickets. (We wouldn’t mind free, but hey…) This past November, EMPAC played host to a New York based theater company who call themselves  Elevator Repair Service.  They performed their show Gatz. An ambitious 7 hour long show in the EMPAC theater was performed by a cast of 13 two nights in a row.

Now, we at RPInsider would probably admit to enjoying plays more than the average college aged RPI student, but we think Gatz was phenomenal.  The show starts off in a low rent office building, with a man who walks in and after fighting a comedic loosing battle with his computer, finds a copy of The Great Gatsby amongst the things on his desk and begins to read it out loud. (The play is a reading of the novel.)  It is then that the office and the world in the book begin to collide. After the first intermission you have just been sold on the concept,  are ready to move around (the chairs look cool, but are a little flat after 2+ hours of sitting on them),  and then are ready to dive back into F. Scott Fitzgerald’s prose. Elevator Repair Service chose to keep the magic and rhythm of the book by not cutting  anything from it.

It would be reasonable to say that it was better than some Broadway shows. We hope it ends up there eventually.

Verdict: Hot

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