Since the publication of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel of the Jazz Age – on April 10, 1925, 99 years ago today — “The Great Gatsby” has been turned into an opera, a ballet, several movies, and a musical that will open on Broadway later this month, with a completely different musical adaptation of the novel also aiming for Broadway. The avant-garde theater company Elevator Repair Service even made its first big splash with “Gatz,” which was a staged verbatim reading of “The Great Gatsby.” But the first adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel was a non-musical play written by playwright Owen Davis for Broadway in 1926, opening just ten months after the novel’s publication.
“The Great Gatsby appeared on Broadway at the right moment,” editors Anne Margaret Daniel and James L. W. West III write in their introduction of “The Great Gatsby: The 1926 Broadway Script” (Cambridge University Press, 142 pages.) “The play made Fitzgerald a substantial amount of money and spread his name across the country.”
Davis’s play was well-received, running at Broadway’s Ambassador Theater (now home of “Chicago.”) for 112 performances over three months in 1926, then spent eight months on the road. To put that Broadway run in perspective: There were 262 productions on Broadway that season. Ticket prices for the play ranged from one dollar all the way up to $3.20.
The script of the play – and the subsequent silent movie adaptation of the play – were both thought lost, but Daniel discovered the script among the playwright’s papers. (The movie is still lost, although a trailer of it is on YouTube.) The script, annotated, is now being published, officially on April 25th (the same day that the unrelated musical is opening on Broadway.)
In their introduction, the editors present the colorful characters, such as the theatrical producer William A. Brady, who was also a boxing promoter, and read the novel the day after it was published, setting out to make it one of the 260 plays he produced during his career; and the director, George Cukor, who became a famous film director, winning the Academy Award for the film of “My Fair Lady.” There are brief portraits of the original cast, many of whom had substantial careers both on stage and screen, such as the production’s Jay Gatsby, James Rennie, who was married to Dorothy Gish at the time, had already starred in nine Broadway plays and would go on to perform in twenty more; and its Daisy Buchanan, Florence Eldridge, who for unknown reasons was ousted from the production before the end of the run. This did not seem to affect her career. The following year, she married actor Fredric March, and played opposite him thirty years later in the original Broadway production of Eugene O’Neill’s “Long Day’s Journey into Night,” for which she was nominated for a Tony, the last of her twenty-five roles on Broadway. (Rennie and Eldridge are the actors in the photograph from the production that’s on this book’s cover.)
And then there is playwright Davis, a Harvard graduate who began as a journalist writing sketches for the Police Gazette, then wrote melodramas with titles like “Deadwood Dick’s Last Shot” before winning the 1923 Pulitzer Prize in Drama for “Icebound,” a family drama involving a will, a surprise inheritance, and an unexpected romance.
“The Great Gatsby” was his fifty-third play on Broadway, but one of his first adaptations. “It is, for me at any rate, far more difficult to make a play from some other person’s novel than it is to build one out of my own fancy,” he wrote at the time. On the other hand, he said, “It really would take a very clever man to make a bad play out of ‘The Great Gatsby.’”
His evident respect for Fitzgerald’s writing didn’t stop him from making the story his own. As Daniel and West write:
Davis took many liberties with Fitzgerald’s storyline. He disassembled the novel, rearranged its parts into a prologue and three acts, and made the action chronological. Information about Jay Gatsby’s past, revealed to us gradually in the novel, is now presented all at once, early in the script. Nick is no longer the narrator; he is only Gatsby’s neighbor and friend. Lines from the novel have been extracted and put into the mouths of the actors. Lines spoken by one character in the novel, however, are often given to another character in the play. New characters have been invented — among them Daisy’s mother, Mrs. Amy Fay; the “colored maid” Sally; an army major named Will Carson; an Irish butler named Ryan; and two criminals named Donnivan and Crosby.” And many scenes were dispensed with: There no party at Tom and Myrtle’s love nest, and no scene at the Plaza Hotel. There is no billboard with the painted eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg. Gone also is what has become the most popular line in the novel, its last line: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
But the green light is still there, the one across the bay, at the end of Daisy’s dock.
