'Gatz' enthralls with the story of 'Gatsby'

All-day stage adaptations of novels are, inevitably, disorienting sensory - and butt-challenging - experiences. But each is strange in its own special way. Watching the Royal Shakespeare Company's 12-hour storytelling of "Nicholas Nickleby" felt like reading a delicious 19th century book alone on a rainy day. Enduring Peter Stein's 12-hour version of Dostoyevsky's "The Demons" last summer was more like being stuck on a transcontinental airline flight with nothing to do but watch a dreary movie.

Now we have "Gatz" - an astonishing, altogether transporting eight-hour day that stays freakily true to every word of F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby" yet re-creates it as a playful work of pure imagination. On the surface, none of the 13 ordinary-looking actors seems anything like the jazz-age characters who party at Jay Gatsby's Long Island mansion in the summer of 1922. There are no flapper dresses. No snappy coupes zoom through the enchanted night.

Instead, director John Collins and the dauntingly original Elevator Repair Service have invented a way to read us the book and play it out in a captivating new dimension - sort of a "Twilight Zone" in the brain.

This is done by sucking us into two simultaneous worlds - a deadly, shabby modern office and Fitzgerald's mysterious, glamorous milieu where luxe '20s America lived more beautifully than it really was.

One morning, a bored worker in a cheap suit can't boot up his ancient computer. He finds a copy of "Gatsby" in an empty Rolodex and starts reading aloud. Co-workers ignore him, then inexplicably start reading with him. Ever so oddly, they start turning into the people saying the dialogue. Slowly, we stop noticing that scenes are played on an old couch and around cardboard files. That is, we see them, but they somehow seem right.

Everything is held together by Scott Shepherd, a seemingly bland fellow who both narrates and plays Nick Carraway, the character witnessing the events of that summer. Ross Fletcher is equally, eerily credible as Gatsby himself - a lanky, balding fellow whose inscrutable face morphs from knowing to bewildered, from menacing to goofy as the narration describes him.

But everyone is a master in this engrossing mash-up of avant-garde sensibilities and old-fashioned storytelling. "Gatsby," symbol of America's need to reinvent itself, gets brilliantly invented again.