Great Lengths: Seven Works of Marathon Theater (review)

Tony Kushner once claimed that “[a] good play, like a good lasagna, should be overstuffed: It has a pomposity, and an overreach: Its ambitions extend in the direction of not-missing-a-trick, it has a bursting omnipotence up its sleeve, or rather, under its noodles” (61–62). Jonathan Kalb’s original and captivating study of marathon theatre offers a lively and convincing defence of the logic behind Kushner’s statement. Against those who assume that the length of a work is secondary to its content, Kalb argues that marathon length – defined as anything over four hours – can, in the best hands, transfigure plays into communal “experiences of extremely unusual intensity” (22).

Kalb’s limpid introduction surveys lengthy theatre from Greece’s City Dionysia to Japanese Noh drama and medieval European Corpus Christi cycles, but he is most interested in contemporary pieces written in tacit (and nostalgic) opposition to the now widespread assumption that plays should last two or three hours. After the introduction, six enthusiastic and considerate chapters analyse seven performances, each of which Kalb attended: the Royal Shakespeare Company’s eight-and-a-half-hour adaptation of Charles Dickens’s Nicholas Nickleby in 1980, Peter Brook’s eleven-hour reimagining of the Sanskrit epic The Mahabharata, a 1984 restaging of Robert Wilson and Philip Glass’s five-hour opera of images, Einstein on the Beach (1976), Tony Kushner’s seven-hour two-part Angels in America (1993), Forced Entertainment’s rule-based six-hour durational pieces Quizoola! (1996) and Speak Bitterness (1994), and Peter Stein’s uncut twenty-one-hour Faust I + II (2000). Despite their obvious diversity, Kalb argues, all of these productions disrupt typical play-going routines, resist the “hurry sickness” of screen-obsessed spectators (2), forge a rare secular brand of public communion, and most important, help reveal theatre’s fundamental capabilities by pushing them to or beyond their limits.

Great Lengths is a major achievement of theatre history and criticism that helps to define a sub-field we might call durational theatre studies. Balancing rigorous scholarship with vivid first-person accounts that transport the reader to each show, this absorbing book will engage theatre aficionados as well as students and scholars. Trusting instincts honed as a lifelong theatregoer and long-time critic for the Village Voice and New York Press, Kalb carefully outlines the significance of these productions, establishes them as members of an overlooked theatrical mode, and defends them against knee-jerk accusations of touristic exoticism (Mahabharata), milquetoast liberalism (Angels), hollow conceptualism (Forced Entertainment), or sterile textual reverence (Faust I + II).

Each chapter provides a detailed tour of the production in question, a reconsideration of critical reactions to it, and a different take on what happens when performances persist. The book’s greatest contribution among many lies in its ability to reveal how, in each case, unusual length focuses attention on one or more of theatre’s fundamental capacities. The persistent inventiveness of Nicholas Nickleby’s forty-eight-member ensemble, for instance, both heightened Dickens’s implicit theatricality and affirmed theatre’s potential as a “sincere, celebratory, and affirmative” art form (42). The boundless imagination animating Brook’s Mahabharata underscored the necessary naiveté and exoticism behind theatre’s acts of world-building. Kushner’s Angels not only proved that the American commercial theatre could sustain “an enjoyable political immersion experience” animated by gay camp, but also that, in its broadest sense, queering is fundamental to any “politically serious use of theater” (95). Einstein on the Beach directed attention to an even more basic property of theatrical performance – the perception of the passage of time – and proved that it can rivet even without a story. The interminable non-narrative catalogues of questions in Quizoola! and confessions in Speak Bitterness also set out to subvert dramatic progression but, for Kalb, revealed the surprising tendency of durational theatre to suggest meaning and generate logic despite itself. Finally, Peter Stein’s adherence...