Perspectives: ‘Gatsby’ at 100 recalls Guthrie litigation dramas

Listen to this article

The centennial of one of America’s greatest pieces of literature, “The Great Gatsby,” is being commemorated this month 100 years after its publication on April 10, 1925.

Although not highly regarded at the time, the novel by St. Paul native F. Scott Fitzgerald, 29 years old at the time, has become an American classic, a staple of school assignments, and extensive scholarly analysis of the work of a core member of American authors known as “The Lost Generation.”

The book, rich in symbolism, also spawned a recent sequel of sorts, a massive 341-page fictional missive titled “The Gatsby Gambit” (Viking Press, 2025). Written by Claire Anderson Wheeler, the novel traces the heroine, Gatsby’s sister, solving the murder of one of the loathsome characters in Fitzgerald’s book, Tom Buchanan, the wealthy racist husband of Gatsby’s love interest, Daisy Buchanan.

Summit saint

Fitzgerald, who died at the young age of 44, has become a saint in his hometown, where he was born and raised on Summit Avenue in a home that still stands, and his surname graces the historic Fitzgerald Theatre a couple of miles away. The facility has gone through a number of iterations and face-lifts over the years. Its profile was probably at its greatest level when it hosted for years the Saturday evening radio broadcasts of Garrison Keillor’s wildly popular “A Prairie Home Companion,” broadcast nationally on National Public Radio.

To add a bit of legal lore to the Fitz, as it is fondly known by some, one of the biggest fans of Keillor’s “Companion” was Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun, a St. Paul native who, like his high court colleague, Chief Justice Warren Burger, grew up not too far from the site.

Fitzgerald’s lineage was as impressive as the building named in his honor; his sobriquet was derived from the creator of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” Baltimore attorney Francis Scott Key. Key’s poem, set to music, was officially consecrated as the national anthem by Congress in 1931 during the ascendancy of Fitzgerald’s career, which would take him to Hollywood as a movie screen writer until his untimely death of a heart attack in 1940.

Converted into a play, the then-youthful author’s masterpiece was the debut presentation at the new $125 million, 285,000-seat Guthrie Theater overlooking the Mississippi River. The facility in downtown Minneapolis, succeeding its predecessor adjoining the Walker Art Center on Vinland Place at the foot of the Kenwood neighborhood, opened in July, 2006. Its predecessor site, designed by noted Minneapolis architect Ralph Rapson, dated back to the Guthrie’s inception with its namesake, British director Sir Tyrone Guthrie overseeing Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” on May 7, 1963.

In the 43 years between “Hamlet” and “Gatsby,” the theater experienced few lawsuits, none of them related to those two classics. The centenary of the latter provides an opportune occasion to review the playhouse’s litigation dramas.

“The play’s the thing.”
William Shakespeare, Hamlet (1603)

* * * * * * * * *

“Everyone had stage fright.”
Sir Tyrone Guthrie, commenting on opening night (May 7, 1963)

* * * * * * * * *

“[Y]ou write because you have something to say.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896 – 1940 )

Rolls removal

The Guthrie’s initial brush with litigation occurred in its first year of existence when the State Commissioner of Taxation, now known as the Department of Revenue, directed the city of Minneapolis to remove the Guthrie’s then-existing facility and related entities from its tax assessment rolls on grounds that they were charitable institutions, exempt from taxes under Article IX, Sec. 1 of the Minnesota Constitution, which prohibits taxation on “institutions of purely public charity,” as well as Minn. Stat. § 272.02 (6).

Some 2½ years later, the Minnesota Tax Court upheld that determination in Minnesota Tax Court v. the Commissioner of Taxation, 1966 WL 28 (Minn. Tax 1966). The property, owned by the Walker Foundation, was used by the Guthrie under a long-term lease. The leasehold interest fell within the charitable exemption because it satisfies the three-part test for treatment as a “charity,” consisting of availability of benefits upon equal terms to all citizens, the intent to make a private property and the use of the property for “purely public charity.” Its purpose to “promote the welfare of the community and to do so without any gain to any private person” gives it a charitable characteristic. The theater’s “imaginative” productions have “injected new vitality into the cultural life and … stimulated the minds and enriched the spirits of hundreds of thousands of patrons and other followers.”

That the theater requires patrons to pay for its performances “does not disqualify [it] as an institution of purely public charity. Charging admission does not vitiate the charitable status of a theater, any more than it does a hospital, which may charge patients, but still is non-taxable if not run for a profit.” As a “cultural resource” that ranks high in importance in the arts, the theater and related organizations are properly classified as “institutions of private or public charity,” exempt from state tax law.

The decision of the three-member Tax Court was not unanimous. A dissenting jurist viewed it as a “very novel proposition that a classical repertory theater [is] an institution of purely public charity.” Treating the theater as tax-exempt would, in view of the dissent, open a “Pandora’s box,” leading to “no end of exemptions claimed by clubs, societies, or associations that are non-profit organizations” ranging from “A” (Abolish Punishment League) to “Z” (Zoologist Society of America). But the dissent’s litany of potential tax exemptions did not carry the day, and the Guthrie has been a tax-exempt non-profit organization since its inception.

Recreational ruling

Another Tax Court case implicating the Guthrie was decided by the state Supreme Court, which affirmed a decision by the tax tribunal that a condominium in Minneapolis, owned by a couple from Sartell outside of St. Cloud, should be treated as a “seasonal or recreational property” with lower real estate tax assessment rates under Minn. Stat. § 273.13 subd. 4(a) in Helgeson v. Hennepin County, 387 N.W.2d 408 (Minn. 1986).

The “recreational” classification resulted in lower taxes for the one-bedroom condominium overlooking Loring Park slightly northeast of the original Guthrie building. The contention of the owners that the property deserved preferential tax treatment was predicated on the condo being used only about 30-40 days annually when they came from their home in Sartell to Minneapolis to attend performances at the Guthrie or nearby Orchestra Hall.

The Supreme Court agreed with that argument, holding that “the condominium is seasonal/recreational.” Its treatment was equated to that of Twin Cities residents who own a cottage or other seasonal dwelling in outstate Minnesota. Treating the two under different tax classifications “would be discriminatory.”

But that did not sit well with two dissenters, who thought that the Legislature, in enacting the seasonal/recreational classification, did not intend to provide a tax break for such activities.

Disability decision

The Guthrie benefits from many volunteers who provide no-charge services for the institution. But one of them found volunteer work jeopardized her ability to obtain Social Security disability benefits in Hanovich v. Astrue, 579 F. Supp.2d 1172 (D. Minn. 2008).

An administrative law judge denied the woman who volunteered at the Guthrie social security disability benefits because her volunteer work was “inconsistent” with her claimed disabling levels of pain and fatigue, which she contended prevented her from working.

U.S. District Court Judge Ann Montgomery, reviewing a magisterial report, remanded the case for further evidence regarding the denial of benefits. In denying benefits, the administrative law judge did not fully develop the record concerning the Guthrie volunteer’s medical condition.

Therefore, further proceedings would be necessary to determine if the claimant did meet or equal any listed impairment, regardless of her volunteer work at the Guthrie.

Inaugural and imitation

Since its gala inaugural night in 1963, when the Guthrie staged “Hamlet” under the direction of Tyrone Guthrie himself, the theater’s founder and artistic director for its first three years, the theater has presented a rich lore of law-related plays. They range from “Saint Joan,” Arthur Miller’s tale of the trial of Joan of Arc, presented in 1964, and again during the 1986-1987 season, to “The Scottsboro Boys,” the 2009-2010 musical about the infamous 1930s trial of nine African American youths unjustly tried and convicted of rape in Alabama.

These cases illustrate the aphorism that sometimes life does, indeed, imitate art.

The Guthrie has survived and thrived for more than six decades while “Gatsby” has done so for a century and undoubtedly will continue much longer for, as the narrator Nick Carraway ruminates in the novel’s coda:

“For we beat our boats against the current, borne back carelessly into the night.”

RELATED: More Perspectives columns

PERSPECTIVE POINTERS

Some “Gatsby” Movies

“The Great Gatsby” (1949): Alan Ladd as Gatsby

“The Great Gatsby” (1974): Robert Redford in title role

“The Great Gatsby” (2000): Toby Stephens as the title character

“The Great Gatsby” (2013): Starring Leonardo DiCaprio

Marshall H. Tanick is an attorney with the Twin Cities law firm of Meyer Njus Tanick Linder & Robbins, PA.