Play Guide [356k PDF] - Arizona Theatre Company

The Great GatsbySYMBOLISMalso a no-man’s land between the glitz and glamour that is New York City and the partiesand revelry of Gatsby’s mansion. It is a divider between the two things and also the routeto get from one to the other. Additionally, in the dusty, forgotten valley of ashes the caraccident happens that wipes away the one energetic component of the area. In reality, inthe late 1930s, in preparation for the World’s Fair in New York in 1939, city leaders hadthe area turned into a public park dubbed Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, which existsto this day.“My idea is always to reach my generation. The wise writer writes for the youth of his owngeneration, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterward.”— F. ScottFitzgeraldEast/West Egg divide: The fictitious locations of East andWest Egg are representative of real places on Long Islandat the time, but Fitzgerald created pseudonyms for them.Most likely Fitzgerald based West Egg on Great Neck, wherehe lived at one point, and East Egg on Manhasset Neck. Inthe novel, Nick describes the area thus: “It was a matterof chance that I should have rented a house in one of thestrangest communities in North America. It was on thatslender riotous island which extends itself due east of NewYork—and where there are, among other natural curiosities,two unusual formations of land. Twenty miles from the citya pair of enormous eggs, identical in contour and separatedonly by a courtesy bay, just out into the most domesticatedbody of salt water in the Western hemisphere, the great wetbarnyard of Long Island Sound. They are not perfect ovals,—like the egg in the Columbus story, they are both crushedflat at the contact end—but their physical resemblance mustActor Remi Sandri who plays thecharacters of Meyer Wolfsheimand Mr. McKee in ATC’sproduction of The Great Gatsby.be a source of perpetual confusion to the gulls that fly overhead.” Nick makes clear thatthe two are exactly the same in natural configuration, but it is human beings that havedifferentiated the two through their association with old and new money. For instance,Nick says, “I live at West Egg, the –well, the less fashionable of the two, though this isa most superficial tag to express the bizarre and not a little sinister contrast betweenthem.” While nature did nothing to designate one as superior to the other, peopleunderstand that it is preferable to live on East Egg because it has longer been associatedwith wealth and social status. Nick clarifies, “Across the courtesy bay the white palacesof fashionable East Egg glittered along the water…” The bay serves as an imaginarydividing line that is all but impossible to cross. No matter how much money members ofthe nouveau riche on West Egg acquires, they will not be good enough to cross the waterand live on East Egg, merely because they are not “old money”. The divides betweenthe two societies are clearly indicated by the geographical distinctions between the twolocations and the inhabitants therein who are accepted socially.Arizona Theatre Company Play Guide 43