When the protean New York theatre actor Scott Shepherd, playing The Great Gatsby narrator Nick Carraway, reaches the contemplative conclusion of GATZ—the six-hour, word-for-word adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s landmark American novel now playing at New York’s Public Theater—he places the hook on the desk in front of him, gazes up at the audience into the dimming light, and recites from memory the poignant, incandescent final pages of the novel, leading to its rueful coda.
As I sat there brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city…
Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther…And one fine morning–
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
By the end of this marathon verbatim staging of Gatsby, a classic American tale of reinvention, self-delusion and broken dreams—audaciously mounted by the New York-based experimental theatre ensemble Elevator Repair Service and set in a drab, fluorescent-tinged industrial office—you can hear Shepherd’s voice crack just a little, and you can detect the audience swallowing hard on the collective lumps that have formed in their throats.
“When I get to that point, I feel that it’s one of the few times in my life when I don’t worry that maybe I should be doing something else,” says the red-headed 42-year-old actor, reverting to a slight Southern drawl. “That’s kind of the constant refrain of my life: ‘In this moment, could I be doing something better?’ Maybe other people feel that way about their lives. But in those final moments in GATZ, I don’t want to be anywhere else. I don’t want to be doing anything else.”
At this point in time, it’s hard to imagine the laconic, easygoing Shepherd suffering from much self-doubt or yearning for a different kind of life. Indeed, he appears to be at the top of his game. Not only is the long-awaited ERS production of GATZ finally coming home to New York in a marquee production at the Public (after five years in legal limbo with the Fitzgerald estate), but the actor himself has become one of downtown New York’s most celebrated experimental theatre performers, delivering wry, unfussy, yet memorable turns in ERS gems like GATZ and Cab Legs, and a host of Wooster Group shows, from To You, the Birdie! and The Hairy Ape to Poor Theatre and Hamlet.
During a recent interview at a cafe near his apartment in SoHo, Shepherd does admit to a restlessness, or perhaps a insatiably curious spirit, that’s always been part of him. After all, this is a guy who once “had a vision of myself as a drifter, every year living in a new town.” After college at Brown University, Shepherd moved from Providence to New York City to Burlington, Vt., then to Seattle in the span of just a few short years, before landing back in the Big Apple.
Ironically, a theme of Gatsby that’s resonated mostly strongly with Shepherd is the illusion that something better in life is just waiting around the corner for you to reach out for or chase after—that thing that will make you happier or more fulfilled.
“The novel is about Fitzgerald and his aching over something, or some things, that slipped through his fingers in the past, and he could never quite shake that regret,” Shepherd observes. “It’s about a grim realization that you’re always anticipating something better, you’re always suffering from a delusion that it just hasn’t happened yet—that thing that is going to make everything better. That’s the feeling at the end of the book, but people forget that. They forget how witty the book is, but they also forget how dark its conclusion is.”
Shepherd’s beating curiosity can be detected in the divergent roles he’s played during a 15-year career in experimental theatre. Skipping ably from playful irony to madcap anarchy to deeply felt emotion, Shepherd has morphed from one character to another with the ease of a smart, self-assured performer who connects with the material on a deep emotional level yet never seems to be taking himself too seriously. In Cab Legs (staged at P.S.122 in 1997), loosely inspired by Tennessee Williams’s Summer and Smoke, Shepherd played a womanizing, gambling-addicted doctor with a kind of anguished grace. After several years of merry-making mischief in the ERS ensemble, Shepherd began working with the pioneering Wooster Group in 1997, soon cementing himself alongside Ari Fliakos and the divine Kate Valk as one of its core ensemble members. With the Group, the actor displayed a wry, easygoing irreverence and an amused deadpan delivery in performances ranging from the the expat American choreographer William Forsythe in Poor Theatre, to a reader who articulates the heroine’s tortured inner thoughts in a deconstruction of Racine’s Phaedre (To You, the Birdie!), to a coolly enigmatic army colonel in the satirical military musical North Atlantic.
Perhaps Shepherd’s most resonant roles to date have been in GATZ, which he was intimately involved in creating, and the Group’s Hamlet, a project he personally championed. His Dane, performed alongside a ghostly projection of the tamed 1964 Richard Burton interpretation on Broadway, was praised for its mordant humor and dialed-down existential angst. With GATZ, Shepherd shape-shifts from a listless office worker with a budding interest in the novel he’s started to read, to an intense embrace of his role as narrator, to what seems like a near-fusion with the book and its characters.
Though Shepherd evinces a palpable curiosity, he’s not a restless performer. Indeed, it’s his sangfroid, ease of performance and playful stage presence—combined with a physical and mental agility and a rigorous commitment to the text—that most distinguishes him as an actor, his collaborators will tell you. In person, Shepherd is soft-spoken and low-key, but once he relaxes into conversation, that mischievous mien shines through, and he’s prone to gently sarcastic asides. “He’s as comfortable in his own skin when he’s performing as anybody you’ll ever see. You can sense watching him that he’s enjoying himself,” avows ERS artistic director John Collins, the director of GATZ. “He doesn’t take himself too seriously, but at the same time, he’s an extremely committed performer.”
His current boss, Elizabeth LeCompte, longtime doyenne of the Wooster Group, remembers seeing him on stage in Cab Legs and not being able to take her eyes off him. “He had that wonderful quality of being very present, and yet at the same time not demanding .something from [the audience],” she explains. “He’s never thinking of what he did and trying to justify it or correct it. He’s never thinking ahead to what he’s going to be doing. He is defiantly in the present. And of course, he’s endlessly entertaining and amusing and interesting to watch. He seems to be enjoying himself, and I love to watch performers enjoy themselves.”
With its conceptual and deconstructionist ideas aimed more at the brain than the heart, its sometimes adversarial approach to text and its tech-heavy theatrical collages that can dominate the stage, the Wooster Group’s aesthetic isn’t an easy one for an actor to navigate. Indeed, it could seem difficult to perform amid all those banks of video screens, moving architectural set pieces, and elaborate lighting and sound designs. The challenge of performing in experimental theatre, says Collins, is to avoid going down the intellectual rabbit hole, or acting in quotation marks by being too removed.
“Scott’s one of the smartest people I know. But his talent is a performer’s talent—it’s not about intellectual capacity,” adds Collins, a longtime friend. “I think that’s a mistake made by a lot of actors and directors who do this kind of devised work. They think their job is to be the smartest kids in school. But as smart and savvy as Scott is, it’s his courage that makes his work great—coupled with the kind of ease and honesty that he brings to performing. It’s not just about being able to recognize the right thing to do; it’s about a spirit of experimentation and a willingness to try things and fail.”
Shepherd’s predilection for experimental theatre started brewing during his undergraduate years at Brown in the late 1980s. Growing up in the staid suburbs of Charleston, S.C., and Atlanta, Ga., Shepherd had gotten hooked on acting in his middle-school drama club, where he was assigned the title roles in both Scrooge and The Wizard of Oz. His high school lacked a drama program, so when he got to Brown, he felt behind the curve compared to other students. He says it took him a while to get up to speed and adjust, but he eventually found a niche in the student theatre group, Production Workshop, where he first got to spread his wings. He recalls one politically minded play about fertility treatments that was built from real interviews with people unable to have children. In it, he delivered a monologue as a fertilized egg.
In his senior year. Shepherd directed a production of The Merry Wives of Windsor, with “some orgastic, site-specific ideas,” that started in the lobby of the theatre and took the audience through the prop shop and into the backstage areas. He also staged a Hamlet in which the action spread throughout the theatre. About halfway through the show, a female actor hidden in the audience would replace the actor playing Hamlet. “She would be all enthusiastic and interrupting the play and saying lines along with the actor,” he recalls. “So finally the guy playing Hamlet gets exasperated and just hands the role over to her. Then she realizes, ‘Uh oh, I’m in way over my head, and I’m about to die.'”
So what is it about Shepherd’s sensibility that drew him to experimental theatre? “I don’t know. Maybe you marginalize yourself, or maybe you get marginalized and then you learn to like it,” he says. “I have always felt that the people who are doing something that didn’t make any sense, or that required a second thought, or that was somehow breaking the rules, was illicit or maybe a little bit suspect, that was always intriguing to me.”
In GATZ, Shepherd, ERS and company are certainly smashing the rules. Set inside a dreary, wood-paneled office, complete with desks, file cabinets and old computers, the production begins when Shepherd’s office drone finds an old paperback copy of Gatsby and starts reading it aloud, not stopping until the lives of Daisy and Tom Buchanan, Jay Gatsby, Jordan Baker and Nick Carraway reach their tragic culmination. Every descriptive passage, every evocative detail, is uttered verbatim.
The book soon exerts a strange force on the reader’s fellow employees (there are 13 performers in all). Small coincidences crop up and incidents in the novel seem to be mirroring the action in the office. Before long, his fellow workers begin inhabiting the characters from the novel’s glittering world, and everyday objects become props in the story. A desk chair serves as Gatsby’s roadster. Liquor bottles materialize from file cabinets during a wild party scene. Yet every so often, the reality of office life reasserts itself. Someone turns on an overhead fluorescent light or delivers a stack of papers.
The staging, in a unique way, echoes the theme of the novel. “One of the central ideas of the book is that a person can make this magnificent identity out of nothing and can overcome where they came from in some way. However, the elements of who you really are keep pulling you back,” reasons Shepherd. “That friction between the office reality and the reality being described is where the creative juice comes from.”
After an invite-only workshop of GATZ at the Performing Garage in 2005 became a word-of-mouth sensation, the Fitzgerald estate shut it down, and the show quickly acquired a reputation as an underground cult event. Since then, the company has performed GATZ all over the world, but has waited more than five years to bring the production home to New York (due in part to another Gatsby adaptation that was aiming for Broadway).
Shepherd has been with GATZ every step of the way, having now memorized the entire novel. Indeed, the actor seems to have a knack for extreme feats of physical and mental stamina (evidenced in his background as both a former computer programmer and an avid student of tae kwon do). Even before he tackled GATZ and Hamlet, Shepherd staged a one-man version of Macbeth in 1994, in which he played every single role. While Shepherd can’t exactly pinpoint why he’s drawn to these kinds of Olympian acting challenges, he doesn’t deny their appeal.
“Maybe it’s a bit of a safety net,” he muses. “Even if [audiences] think the acting is mediocre, if it’s coupled with some sort of superhuman feat, they have to admit that, you know, you did read that entire book for seven hours. Or you did do Macbeth—all by yourself. So I do gravitate toward those things where people go, ‘How did he do that?'”
As the marathon evening of GATZ draws to a close, Shepherd says that emotions in the theatre are always at a boiling point because of the cumulative power of the story. “There’s a shared exhaustion. Everybody is tired, both actors and the audience, but also everybody has that same thrill that we’re coming into the beautiful home stretch. And it’s my job to deliver the words the best I can. If it doesn’t work, it’s not Fitzgerald’s fault, it’s not the director’s fault. This is for me to do—and I love to do it.”
Arts reporter Christopher Wallenberg is a frequent contributor to this magazine.
