Culchah
We’re braving the snow beast tonight to head to the Seattle Center to see Seattle Repertory Theater’s production of The Great Gatsby. It was a last-minute suggestion by a friend, whom we’re meeting there. It’s odd, but this will be our first visit to the Rep in years, and our first Seattle theater in the last year. Odd, because we’re members of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and have been engaging in week-long theater orgies in Ashland for the last 12 years. We spend that week being dazzled by live theater and promising ourselves to keep the momentum when the fall seasons start in Seattle, and somehow we never get it done.
Back in the late 80s/early 90s, we had ACT season tickets for several years, but encountered a particularly weak season and decided we’d bag the season tickets and cherry-pick from the various theaters instead. Predictably, we never saw anything ever again. I read Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby When I was about 25, and I don’t remember it making a great impression. Probably because I wasn’t old enough, and, as someone who didn’t yet own furniture, didn’t really comprehend the nuance of nouveau-riche angst. I won’t, then, be able to make a credible comparison of this production to Fitzgerald’s novel. Usually, though, when I see a movie based on a book, I try to divorce the two, and evaluate the movie as film and not as an attempt to recreate literature on film. I believe I’d rather approach this play the same way.
I’ll let you know.
