I was only sixteen when I fell in love with Fitzgerald’s,The Great Gatsby. Although I have always been a voracious reader, there was something about that book that caught hold of me in a way I had not experienced before. When I finished it I remember feeling sad,disappointed, not confused per se, but cheated, if I am honest, as the ending was not what I wanted it to be. At sixteen everyone is supposed to fall in love with that one special person that will complete them for all time, for that is what is beautiful and right. When the novel was again assigned my freshman year of college I balked; had I not done that as a sophomore in high school? Could my private, liberal arts college provide me no greater challenge? And so it was then I learned the importance of reading a truly great novel many times. Suddenly, my now far more mature self truly understood what the great author had intended… until I read it again, the summer before I began graduate school in an elite program to which I never dreamed I'd gain admittance… and the summer after I defended my dissertation; an intense examination of social class… and the dreary winter I gave birth to my daughter, this time sobbing in the wee hours of the night over Daisy’s remark that she hoped her daughter would be a fool, for that was the best for which she could hope, having been born a woman. In retrospect, the sleep deprivation and the hormonal avalanche may have influenced these particularly strong feelings! Each time I read it, the book unveiled new meaning for me, and each time I read it, I felt strangely as if I was returning to see old friends; as so beautifully does Fitzgerald harness humanity.
Every director is asked, “so why this show?”. For me the “why” wasn’t one certain thing, it was, instead, a mixture of little things...something about working with teens struggling to predict and plan a future although barely eighteen, and something about seeing teens still fighting the same issues as those of my teenage friends and self nearly twenty years later,and definitely something about wishing I had known then, what I know now, made Gatsby relevant in this time and in this place.
