INTERVIEW: Rob Brinkmann on how to make ‘Gatsby’ truly immersive
Photo: Stephanie Rocío and Rob Brinkmann star in The Great Gatsby: The Immersive Show. Photo courtesy of Joan Marcus / Provided by BBB with permission.
The Great Gatsby: The Immersive Show takes F. Scott Fitzgerald’s well-known book and create a wondrous, maze-like narrative in which audiences have the chance to experience the various storylines and characters in new and exciting ways. The action takes place at the Gatsby Mansion, a redeveloped ballroom space at the Park Central Hotel in Midtown Manhattan. Rather than having a seat and watching the drama unfold on a proscenium stage, theatergoers are whisked away to Jay Gatsby’s estate and his swinging soiree. There’s some boozing, some dancing, some crying and some laughing — all within inches of the audience members who feel like party guests at the mansion.
The Great Gatsby: The Immersive Show, which sadly finishes its summer run Sunday, Aug. 27, offers many opportunities and welcome challenges to Rob Brinkmann, the actor portraying Nick Carraway. In many ways, the Nick character is a stand-in for the audience. He has been invited to the Gatsby Mansion, much like the theatergoers, and he’s experiencing the decadence and sinfulness like a moth attracted to the flame. But once he gets to know Daisy (Jillian Ann Abaya) and Gatsby (Joel Acosta), he realizes he may be in over his head.
“I read it in high school like so many Americans — studied it, wrote papers on it — and then I hadn’t touched it in years,” Brinkmann said in a recent phone interview. “I read it again before we started rehearsals, so I was very familiar with it once we jumped into the room itself.”
Brinkmann, who is no stranger to immersive theater having performed with Touch Performance Art, found inspiration for the Nick role by going back to Fitzgerald’s words and closely inspecting the source material.
“I tried to stay away from watching any of the movies,” he admitted. “Of course, I’ve seen the movies in my life, but in my research, I really wanted to get to the text and Fitzgerald’s words and the way that he crafted Nick originally. … So once I went through the book and created a nice outline of who this man was and his intentions and his flaws and everything I love about him, you then look at the script because, like any adaptation, there’s going to be little differences from the way that the book is crafted into how we can translate that onto the stage in a two-and-a-half-hour piece.”
He read the script for The Immersive Show and tried to see what carried over from Fitzgerald’s original novel. He then searched for motivations and reasonings behind the Nick character. What makes him say a certain line? What makes him turn left and not right? Helping him was director Alexander Wright and the many creatives behind the scenes.
“The whole team [who] created and developed this show, they put so much actual Fitzgerald text in the dialogue that we get a lot of audience members who come up to us after the show, and they say to us, teachers that have been teaching this for 25 years, they’re like, ‘I’ve been teaching this for years. Above all the movies, this is the most accurate depiction of this story to the book that I’ve seen or that I’ve encountered,’ which feels good because that’s all the work that we put into it to try and express,” Brinkmann said. “We have a little bit of leeway in the fact that our show is immersive, and so although it’s a two-and-a-half-hour piece, it’s about 14 hours of material that happens over top of each other. So we do get to dive a little deeper into the side moments, the smaller, secretive moments of these characters that inevitably build their reasoning for why they make the choices that bring this tragedy to its finality.”
So, on an individual night, a single audience member won’t be able to experience everything that The Immersive Show has to offer, but that’s one of the joys of immersive theater. Follow one path for an intimate scene, while your fellow patrons are in another room, experiencing a plot point and character that are completely different.
One insider’s tip: It’s never a bad idea to follow Nick throughout the evening. “I love this character for so many reasons,” Brinkmann said with genuine enthusiasm. “I’m a bibliophile myself, and it’s such an honor to embody one of these great characters in American mythology.”
The actor added: “I’m a vet of immersive theater. I’ve been doing immersive theater for over a decade, and so I’ve learned that immersive theater is very site-specific. So no matter how much you explain on paper what a piece is going to look and feel like, there is no way, even for someone like myself, to truly conceptualize how it’s going to live in a space and then live with an audience.”
For Brinkmann, the many routes that the actors and audience members take throughout the evening were difficult to visualize. He needed to walk around this ballroom space and the side rooms to see how the “flow” would actually work. The company and creatives worked these routes time and time again, ensuring they understood how to move people around the “mansion.”
“I owe it to the production team and to the development team because it takes so much time to go through a script like this and go, OK, this character is taking characters from point A to point B during this moment in time,” he said. “When this times out, they’re going to take characters from point B to point F. Meanwhile another character is taking you from point C to point B. Oh, they can’t see each other in this room, so let’s have them go this other way. So that’s the work that they were telling us in the rehearsal room, and we were all going, ‘Oh my God, that sounds so crazy.’ They’re like, ‘There’s no way you’re going to understand it until we get in the space.’ Alex was always saying, ‘We can rehearse this piece 60 percent without the audience, and the rest comes when we have an audience with us.’ In truth, that is what happened. We had our scenes. We had everything prepared as actors, but there is no way to truly develop how a flow is going to happen for an immersive piece until you get an audience in there.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
The Great Gatsby: The Immersive Show, starring Rob Brinkmann at Nick Carraway, continues through Sunday, Aug. 27 at the Gatsby Mansion in Midtown Manhattan. Click here for more information and tickets.
