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This past month at Northwestern “The Great Gatsby,” by F. Scott Fitzgerald, was adapted for the stage. Directed and performed by students, the show closely followed the text while also bringing artistic takes to the staging, backdrop, and acting. Every year, the junior class reads the “great American novel” as a part of the American Literature course, and every year the novel brings up questions of love, money, the reliability of the narrator, race, and gender.

For the first time in recent memory, members of different parts of the Parker community came together to see the show and after to discuss not only their take on the novel and what it is all about, and what it has meant to them, but also how the Northwestern production adapted the story for the stage.

The lively hour-long discussion that took place at Parker on November 4, featuring four upper school English teachers, Matt Laufer, Bonnie Seebold, Stacey Gibson, and Theresa Collins; parent Liesl Olsen; alumnus Ivan Parfenoff; Executive Assistant to the Principal Sarah Butterfield; and high school senior Graham Silverman; and which I moderated can be seen above.

What follows are excerpts from our roundtable. The spirit but not the exact order of the conversation was preserved. For the sake of this article I spliced some sections together so that you might get the meat of the talk and the flow we otherwise maintained.

Bonnie Seebold: I do like adaptations of books to the stage. I teach the Literature Adapted for the Stage course. I think literature has dramatic elements, and theater has narrative elements in it starting way back with the chorus in the Greek plays. I think it does lend itself pretty easily to the stage adaptation.

Stacey Gibson: My first encounter with it was in an American Lit class. It was pitched as a great American love story. And I went right along with that for about a third of the book, and I was completely bored and completely detached, and I couldn’t figure out where the love was. In post college studies I realized that it was really the quintessential lovelessness story. It takes on an entirely different spin when looked at that way. And so now as a teacher, I ask students to think about why it would be marketed as the great American love story. In terms of adaptation, I am always very interested in adaptation because the body pulls stories and the body rejects stories. And so on stage I am very interested in the reactions when a story gets embodied.

Theresa Collins: I love “The Great Gatsby.” I think it is a pretty perfect novel. I love the way that the characters are fully there but also kind of fully intangible. I remember reading someone’s essay about the fact that you can’t physically describe really anyone in this story, and I just find that so fascinating because I feel like you can know them really really well. They are recognizable. They are known by their voice or their possessions, their houses, their cars, and their actions.

Ivan Parfenoff: The first problem I had was if you are going to do a play on a novel, it has got to add something new. A play has to do something special that you wouldn’t get otherwise.

Liesl Olsen: The great capacity of a novel is its ability to have you enter the minds of other people, many of whom are profoundly unlike yourself. And then you have this other genre of the theater, which is such a collective experience, and it seems like that collectivity and the embodiment of the performers is the defining principle of dramatic form. So much of the descriptions of the characters refers to their gestures. The moments in the performance that leaned on that were really good: movement, gesture, choreography. The singing was excellent because it kind of presented Daisy as a siren.

Matt Laufer: I was thinking about delusion. One of my favorite moments in the play–surprisingly, because it was really theatrical and dramatic–was when [Daisy] sings… How can you convey a voice that is “full of money” on stage? I thought that was a really interesting way to do it. And then the men walk as if in a sort of trance. They seem almost deluded. Captivated. Hallucinating.

Sarah Butterfield: I think it is interesting, since so much of the novel is about people’s delusions, even Nick has this delusion of Gatsby as being some higher character, having some higher values. [Nick] doesn’t listen to any of the gossip that’s trying to bring Gatsby down. He never believes that he is a bootlegger, and if he is, who cares? He is delusional.   

ML: I think Nick, of all of the characters, is the most fully fleshed out. And that’s a problem in chamber theater if you are really committed to the narrator. I find compelling the interpretation that Nick and Gatsby are in love. Or that Nick is in love with Gatsby. I agree with the loveless reading, down to Daisy’s daughter. What a terribly sad little vessel in that relationship. I think Baz Luhrmann in the movie is full-on committed to Nick’s being in love with Gatsby.

Graham Silverman: It was really awesome getting to see the book be portrayed in a new medium. Especially in the way that it was put on. Honestly, I like the vagueness of the book. I like being able to interpret some of the things in my own way… I sort of enjoyed being told what to think in the play. It was nice to see someone’s interpretation of it physically manifested instead of just having eight different narratives going on in my mind at the same time. I really really enjoyed it.

ML: One way to appreciate an adaptation is to take it as a dramatic and entertaining lecture on an interpretation of the novel. That holds great value.