Pretty Good Gatsby Romances The Rep

If it's not a great Gatsby, we can blame F. Scott Fitzgerald's preference for establishing mood at the expense of story arc. The good news is that this production revels in atmosphere: Tom Lynch's pitch-perfect set design and Jane Greenwood's gorgeous '20s costumes -- combined with Scott Zielinski's dreamily radiant lighting -- conjure up exactly the right nostalgia for a time that never was. We could have done without the itinerant saxophonist, whose bluesy wails belong in the adaptation of a novel by Saul Bellow, not Fitzgerald.

The Great Gatsby runs through December 10 at the Seattle Rep. It's about two and a half hours with a 15-minute intermission. Tickets are $15-$48 ($10 for 25-and-under).

We'd recap but in theory you read this in high school, right? As in the book, Nick Carraway (Matthew Armendt) narrates the story for us, but minimally, just the famous passages. Armendt declaims these like the poetry they are, capturing Fitzgerald's rhythmic delivery. In the play, it's easier to see he's delivering an elegy for Gatsby and his impossible love.

Heidi Armbruster plays Daisy Buchanan, Gatsby's obscure object of desire, as a feather-brained Southern flirt, without dropping "the act" to reveal the sudden depths that make people fall for her. The love story here is between Nick and Jay Gatsby (Lorenzo Pisoni), who in his relentless pursuit of the superficial achieves a weird kind of nobility. Pisoni understands that for Gatsby, it's all a question of how you come off. He never flashes a reflexive, ingratiating grin without checking on its reception.

Where this Gatsby succeeds is in demonstration how our ambitions make such beautiful, walking, 2-D portraits of us. Backlit and highlighted, Tom, Jordan, Gatsby and Daisy are all lovely as a photograph, so weightless it's hard to believe the damage they caused while we were marveling at them.

Photo: Cheyenne Casebier (Jordan Baker) and Matthew Amendt (Nick Carraway) in Seattle Repertory Theatre's production of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s THE GREAT GATSBY. Copyright 2006 © Michal Daniel.