As a high school teacher who taught The Great Gatsby for over two decades, I had refined my approach to Fitzgerald’s novel to this: great writing, lousy characters. They’re all horrible people: Meyer Wolfsheim is a mobster, Tom Buchannan’s a racist and a bully, Jordan Baker cheated at golf, Gatsby’s a liar, and Daisy’s a ditz. Yes, they’re rich and yes, they’re pretty, but I’m a Grapes of Wrath guy—give me a book about people with dirt under their fingernails who drink their coffee black. Having said that, the writing, mon deux, is maybe the finest ever. F. Scott gets carried away describing Jay’s outlandish parties, but there are moments when I pause and sigh at what he did. His words seem to come from God, not the dictionary.
But a funny thing happened on the way to making Gatsby into a play, which I did for The Foodbank Player’s current production—I fell in love with these bourgeoisies, these dilettantes, these scoundrels with slick hair. In 2021, the book entered the public domain and four years later I decided to put the East and West Egg crowds up on stage. I downloaded the novel onto my laptop and began the fun/hard work of adapting, which is to say I began the cutting. All the scenes and all the characters could not fit into a play of any reasonable length. The exception to this is a New York-based theater company called the Elevator Repair Service, which did a six-and-a-half-hour version of The Great Gatsby back in 2010 using everything and everyone. I saw the show Gatz at Berkeley Rep in 2020 and it was immersive and incredible. For The Foodbank Players, I was looking at two hours max, and with a smaller cast of nine actors. So, fewer guests at the parties, hotel scenes were trimmed, and yes, a lot of the phenomenal narration from main character Nick Carraway had to go. Sorry Fitzie!
But even of shorter length, at our first read-through I grimaced at the initial portrayals the actors were trying out. Tom mentions reading The Rise of the Coloured Masses and my stomach tightened. Daisy tells Nick she hopes her daughter will be a beautiful little fool, Gatsby lies about his family background, Jordan still wants to party after Myrtle is killed, and Nick—the smartest guy in the room—seems indifferent to them all. But as actors will tell you, every one of them wants their character to be the hero of the story, it’s the work they do to embrace the role. And in helping them do that, in asking questions, offering ideas of how to play a scene, in seeing themes and the arc a character travels, I saw the “rotten crowd” in ways I’d never really understood while teaching the book.
It greatly helped that the actors doing this work are terrific—talented people with open minds and the myriad skills it takes to be someone else for a while each night. Directing is intellectual, understanding the text and characters, but it’s also emotional, striving to see and enlarge the nuances of who we are and creating with actors the larger story from their individual tales. It’s very much like teaching, but of greater depth with different goals—yes, to understanding, but also to figuring out how to show it on stage. Each actor’s performance is like a chapter in a book that I essentially edit and publish.
I’ll share that the greatest challenge and pleasure has been helping the actor playing Daisy do so with dignity and dimension and not just as someone who looks good in a dress and knows how to hold a champagne flute. Darrah Jones is our Daisy, and her previous roles as Lear’s daughter Regan and Lady Macbeth did not carry over to Mrs. Tom Buchannan. So we did the work, looking at the text and context, considering who Daisy is from what the author tells us, then having to fill in the gaps, making thoughtful assumptions in order to have a strong, smart woman in 2025 play someone who seems shallow, from the 1920s. Comparing then and now gave us insight into how the world has changed but people maybe have not.
Daisy is a young mother and wife who, unexpectedly, has someone from her earlier life return and offer her, to borrow from Robert Frost, the road not taken. In many ways that’s the other core of the story. For Gatsby it’s his path to reclaim what he lost, but for Daisy it’s the choice, the dramatic fulcrum of the story. Should she give up what she has for what she could have had? Nearly everyone read The Great Gatsby in their junior year and remembers how it all comes undone. But for me, the teacher of this book to thousands of you, it took our play version to better understand the temptation and terror of Daisy’s decision.
Come see what we’ve done and compare it to what you read or saw in the recent movie. The Great Gatsby, put on by The Foodbank Players, opens February 27 and runs through March 15 at Daisy’s, 1347 Park Street. Admission is free but, as always, donations to support the Alameda Food Bank are gratefully accepted. Reserve your free ticket(s) online.
Gene Kahane is the founder of the Foodbank Players, a lifelong teacher, and former Poet Laureate for the City of Alameda. Reach him at [email protected]. His writing is collected at AlamedaPost.com/Gene-Kahane.
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