Adult Adolescence - The Characters of Gatsby

The Sacramento Ballet is set to premier Ron Cunningham’s “The Great Gatsby” in one month!  The company has been working very hard learning there various parts and I am anticipating seeing more and more choreography from my fellow dancers through the next few weeks.  I am a huge fan of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel and have read it at least a dozen times – always feeling a special connection since it is set on Long Island, where I am from!  In “The Great Gatsby” I will be playing the character of Tom Buchanan (along with Rick Porter).  He's the type of guy you pretend to like because he's athletic, rich, and powerful…but secretly you wouldn’t mind if he was hit by a car.  Although Tom might be a hedonistic snake his character and actions are comparable to the rest of the cheats and cons that comprise of the characters within the story.  The novel itself begins with a preface, which clearly highlights the nature of the people you and situations you will read about: “The Great Gatsby does not proclaim the nobility of the human spirit; it is not politically correct; it delivers no fashionable or comforting messages. It is just a masterpiece.”

The other day after rehearsal I was able to speak directly with artistic director Ron Cunningham to get some inside information on his portrayal of these 1920’s personas of the ballet.  He explained that during the holiday break he had continued research on the “The Great Gatsby” and read a biography on author F. Scott Fitzgerald.  He had learned  that Fitzgerald himself was quite an eccentric character – who like the people in his novel were adults, with endless amounts of money, who acted like children – getting caught up in the carefree lifestyle of the Jazz Age and taking no responsibility for their actions.  He also had said that Fitzgerald was a man who consistently felt as though he had to overly express his masculinity and created a great amount of tension with literary contemporaries such as Earnest Hemmingway.  I feel that in “the Great Gatsby” Tom may represent the author’s portrayal of that unattained sense of extreme masculinity, which Tom ostensibly displays in his relations with others, especially women. 

I included a clever character map of “The Great Gatsby” so everyone can start knowing who’s who!  It’s the cat’s pajamas.