Santa Clara University

A Graceful Story About the Disaster of Amoral Living

Kristin Kusanovich '88 is a faculty member of the Theatre and Dance Department. She and her husband, Mark Larson, brought their theater troupe, based in St. Paul, Minn., to SCU to perform their original stage adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Rich Boy" with the support of the Bannan Center for Jesuit Education. She wrote about the project for the center's explore magazine, from which this is adapted.

"The Rich Boy" was written while Fitzgerald was in Capri awaiting publication of The Great Gatsby. Our troupe was attracted by the moral challenge implicit in the story, which is at once a memory piece, a treatise on the laws and loss of friendship, a graceful account of the disaster of amoral living, and an uncomfortable but intriguing journey through the emotional terrain of one man born into wealth and all of its assumptions.

The devastation is of the spiritual order, is never stated explicitly, and comes at the audience from behind. Wrestling with this story helped us to understand our own limitations and define our own sense of justice. Amidst the apparent opportunity and ease that the rich boy's wealth provided, one is forced to wonder whether his real goodness or happiness ever had a fighting chance.

We made a simple but profound discovery that we could treat the narration as dialogue-a dialogue with the audience- and so we kept every word and spoke right to the members of the audience. This produced an effect that had the gentleness of being read to, and yet was also startling, fresh, and provocative.

The reactions and admissions brought out through the process of this project have been strong and enlightening. The text speaks to students of literature, psychology, and sociology. It speaks to workers for social justice, theater aficionados, members of all faiths, and members of the outside community. In the intellectual, aesthetic, moral, spiritual, physical, and social truths of Fitzgerald's characters, the actors and audience undergo a transformation of consciousness and travel toward a common ground of meaning. The images in this story etch themselves hauntingly into one's memory.

Our production followed Fitzgerald's lead in refusing to simplify the questions of justice that the work presents. Yet the force and momentum of this staged version allowed the participants to undertake a journey in which our often-unquestioned assumptions about those born into wealth were brought into clearer focus.The essential questions raised by Fitzgerald's words, and put into flesh and blood by the ensemble, remain poignant for our times.

Just as many students arrive at SCU without an explicit commitment to the Jesuit character of the University, but find it unfolding before them and perhaps inside of themselves as they engage in four years of life here, so it is with theater of this intimacy and intensity. An audience of students, staff, and faculty may be drawn to a night at the theater for a myriad of reasons, but it is the goal of our work that they leave the theater transformed, revitalized, and with a subtler awareness of our social reality.