Eight hours

I walked into On The Boards around four this afternoon; I walked out just after midnight.

If you're tuned in to the theater scene in Seattle (not that I am, though I'd like to be), you probably know what I was doing there. If not, here it goes: I watched a troupe from NYC, known as Elevator Repair Service, read and act out The Great Gatsby, in its entirety. They call it Gatz and I thought it was really cool.

The voice of Nick Carraway started off the evening, or afternoon, rather, walking into the office with a cup of coffee in hand. He fiddled with an uncooperative computer and, while opening his rolodex, came across a tattered copy of the novel. Alone in the office, he looked at the clock then began reading...

...and he didn't stop, except for two intermissions and a dinner break. His coworkers came and went, playing the parts of Daisy, Gatsby, etc. at times while performing mundane office duties at others. They floated back and forth between fiction and reality and I glided along with them.

In an amazing feat of memorization, at the beginning of the final chapter, Nick started flipping the pages, back to front, but continued "reading" as he had been all night. This recitation continued to the penultimate sentence before he reopened the book to read, "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past." One got the feeling that he very well could have recited the entire book from memory. Rumor has it that he actually knows the whole thing.