Off the Lake Productions will bring the classic story “The Great Gatsby” to the stage with a slight twist this weekend. Credit: Courtesy of Nicole Beckman.
Off the Lake Productions will bring F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel “The Great Gatsby” — set in New York in 1922 — to the stage, along with a touch of the 2020s.
Ohio State’s student-run, service-based theater organization will perform Simon Levy’s stage adaptation of “The Great Gatsby” in the Lawrence Tower Ballroom Thursday through Sunday and the weekend of Feb. 25-27. The production will be Off the Lake’s first in-person, full-length play since the beginning of the pandemic, Nicole Beckman, a 2021 Ohio State alumna and director of “The Great Gatsby,” said.
Beckman said the classic story of the self-made millionaire has been fun to approach from a personal perspective.
“I’ve been having a lot of fun taking a story that everyone has read for, like, a century and known and kind of making it my own,” Beckman said. “Everyone knows the story, but no one really knows a specific adaptation, and you can kind of do whatever you want with it to a certain extent.”
Beckman said one of the biggest twists in her rendition of “The Great Gatsby” is the soundtrack, which will be largely made up of music from the 2020s and has been in the works since February of 2021.
“We do have some 1920s music in it where I feel it’s necessary, but for the most part, it’s all 2020s songs, pop songs, songs that I feel people can relate to as our own form of the Jazz Age,” Beckman said.
Beckman said Off the Lake has never before put on a show that paired modern music with an old story, and finding music that fits organically into the show can be difficult.
“I’ve had to really go through each song of each scene and pick out clips of the song and what words the singer is singing and making sure it makes sense with the scene and everything,” Beckman said. “And I think that’s very different from anything that we’ve done with shows in the past.”
Miles Skove, a second-year in finance and political science who will play Jay Gatsby in the show, said it has been surreal to take on such a well-known character.
“Everyone knows Jay Gatsby — everybody’s seen the movie or they’ve read the book in high school,” Skove said. “People have a lot of familiarity with the characters. There can be a little bit of pressure to perform it the way people expect to see that character, but it has definitely been fun because it’s a classic for a reason, and he’s a very interesting character.”
Skove said telling the story onstage is unique from how the story is told in books or movies.
“There are things that you can get out of a live performance because you’re physically in the room with the actors, and you can add some more emotion there, a little bit more of the interpersonal character development that is harder to get through on the screen,” Skove said. “We also don’t have the magic of video editing and massive firework displays and 100-person parties to play around with, so we’re limited in some respects as well.”
Multiple COVID-19 restrictions will be put in place for the production to reduce the spread of the virus, Beckman said, including requiring that the cast be fully vaccinated and wear clear masks at all times. Masks are also to be worn by the audience at all times, and no food or drink is allowed to be consumed around others.
Beckman said she believes one of the most important things to come out of this show is being able to perform onstage in person again, instead of continuing to adapt to a virtual format.
“It’s about finding reality versus illusion,” Beckman said. “I think in a time where we’re all looking at our computers all the time and we aren’t really being able to be in person, it’s our own version of the ‘20s and our own version of what’s real and what’s not.”
Admission to “The Great Gatsby” will cost $1 or a canned good at the door, and donations will benefit the Kaleidoscope Youth Center. Shows will start at 7 p.m. Thursday through Saturday and Feb. 25-26, as well as at 2 p.m. Saturday, Sunday and Feb. 26-27.
