F. Scott Fitzgerald's "Gatz' in New York

Marathon theater is the rage this fall in New York. Tony Kushner's two-part, six-hour 1993 masterwork, Angels in America, has been revived at the Signature Theatre. Downtown at the Public Theatre, the Tricyle Theatre Company's production of The Great Game: Afghanistan consists of 12 plays by 12 playwrights exploring the history of Afghanistan over three separate evenings. Last season, Horton Foote's autobiographical "nonalogy," The Orphans Home Cycle (a trilogy consisting of three parts each), played to sold-out houses at the Signature Theatre Company. Before that, in 2006-2007 at Lincoln Center, Tom Stoppard's Coast of Utopia, a sweeping trilogy about the 19th-Century Russian intelligentsia, received a nine-month run.

But no marathon work is more daring or innovative— not to mention more challenging for audience and performers alike — than Gatz, a word-for-word theatrical rendering of the entire text of F. Scott Fitzgerald's immortal 1925 novel, The Great Gatsby, currently playing at the downtown Public Theatre. Gatz is performed over an eight-hour period (with two intermissions and a brief dinner break) by the audacious Elevator Repair Service Theatre Company.

This adventuresome New York-based ensemble, founded in 1991 by John Collins, is known for its unique adaptations of novels, developed by its company members through extended periods of collaboration. The company's repertoire also includes Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury and Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, which played this past September at the Philadelphia Live Arts Festival and Philly Fringe. Since it was first developed in 2005, Gatz has toured extensively, with performances in America (Minneapolis, Chicago) and overseas in places as far-flung as Brussels, Brisbane, and Singapore. Its current, sold-out production at the Public runs through November 28.

"The entire Great Gatsby, read word for word, aloud, on the stage?" you might well ask, incredulously. "Are you serious?" But it's true.

Shabby office, and then…

Imagine this: you come into the theater, where you barely notice a man sitting at a desk in a shabby, non-descript office (he turns out to be one of the production's stage managers). Lights go up on another undistinguished-looking man, sitting at another desk, fiddling with a malfunctioning computer. Bored, distracted, he opens a large Rolodex and finds a paperback novel, which he begins to read: "In my younger and more vulnerable years"— the memorable opening lines of The Great Gatsby. At first, it works well as a shared joke, one that the audience relishes, as we watch a bored office worker boring his colleagues even more by reading a novel aloud in a detached, droning voice.

But that's where the theater magic begins, under John Collins's inspired direction. Gradually (almost too gradually for the theatergoer with the standard two-and-a-half hours' attention span), as the voice of the character drones on, the novel recedes and a unique theatrical event emerges. You forget the shabby office surroundings and watch spellbound as a dozen bland-looking office workers assume the characters of Nick Carraway (Fitzgerald's narrator), the society belle Daisy, the mythic magnate Gatsby himself, and other characters— and enact the entire novel.

Aristocrats at play

Eventually, the shabby surroundings disappear as the narrative evokes the glittering world of Long Island's social aristocracy at play in the Roaring '20s. In our collective imagination, the office is transformed into a glamorous scene of partygoers in elegant evening dress (though the actors are still in work clothes)— as vivid as if the scene were actually being staged and costumed in Gatsby's decadent mansion. Another scene, where Nick, Gatsby and Daisy end up in the Plaza Hotel on a sweltering August afternoon, remains indelible in my mind; the charisma of the narrative has transformed that cluttered office into a decadent, richly-appointed, heavily-curtained hotel room without a change in scenery at all.

Every once in a while, during the almost seven hours of continual charismatic narrative (yes, actor Scott Shepherd, who becomes the novel's narrator "Nick Carraway," reads every single word), a computer repairman wanders in and out, taking us momentarily out of the spell that the narrative has cast. At other moments, the company indulges in metatheatrical mischief "“ when, for example, the office worker playing Gatsby enters in Part III wearing a light pink suit (evoking the kind of decadent costume that Gatsby might have worn.) But rather than distract, these moments create the opposite effect: We marvel all the more at the power of those words to transport us back in time to another time and place.

Narrating from memory

In the last quarter of this theater marathon, the cumulative narcotic of the narrative takes over the audience full-force. The actor Scott Shepherd, who has been reading from the novel for hours and hours non-stop, nonchalantly puts the book down and narrates the last chapters by heart. (According to the theater grapevine, he has memorized the entire novel; in the performance I saw, he narrated the last 45 minutes without reading.)

It's one of the most valiant coups de théâtre I've ever seen"“ a stunning theatrical feat of virtuosity and sheer audacity (an artistic endurance test matched this season only by a dazzling 40-minute monologue by Mark Rylance in David Hirson's La Bête, currently on Broadway). In these still, pure moments, the magic of the theater is indisputable, and any lingering audience doubts (e.g., "Should I have stayed home and read the book instead?") are dispelled.

This daring company— whose artistic hallmark, like Simon McBurney's brilliant London-based Théâtre de Complicité, is collaboration — is worth a trip to New York to cue for returns. (Director John Collins, who has never yet missed a performance of Gatz in the five years since it was first performed, says that a piece of theater is never finished, so who knows? You may see a different show than I did.) It's worth it, for the miracle of transforming a literary classic into a living, breathing, transporting, astonishing evening of theater.