We know that size matters in many areas of human endeavour, but what about works of the imagination? Why do some dramatic creations extend to five hours or more, and how does their extreme length help them accomplish extraordinarily ambitious aims? In Great Lengths, theatre critic and scholar Jonathan Kalb addresses these and other questions through a close look at seven internationally prominent theatre productions, including Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, Robert Wilson’s Einstein on the Beach, the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Nicholas Nickleby, and the
durational works
of the British experimental company Forced Entertainment. This is a book about extreme length, monumental scope, and intensive immersion in the theatre in general, written by a passionate spectator reflecting on selected pinnacles of his theatregoing over thirty years.
The book’s examples, deliberately chosen for their diversity, range from adapted novels and epics, to dramatic chronicles with macrohistorical and macropolitical implications, to stagings of super-size classic plays, to
postdramatic
works that negotiate the border between life and art. Kalb reconstructs each of the works, re-creating the experience of seeing it while at the same time explaining how it maintained attention and interest over so many hours, and then expanding the scope to embrace a wider view and ask broader questions. The discussion of Nicholas Nickleby, for example, considers melodrama as a basic tool of theatrical communication, and the section on Peter Brook’s The Mahabharata explores the ethical problems surrounding theatrical exoticism. The chapter on Einstein on the Beach grows into a reflection on the media-age status of the much-debated Gesamtkunstwerk (or
total artwork ) and a reassessment of the long avant-gardist tradition of challenging the primacy of rational language in theatre. The essay on Peter Stein’s Faust I + II becomes a reflection on the interpretive role of theatre directors and the theatrical viability of antitheatrical closet drama. Great Lengths thus offers a remarkable panorama of the surprisingly broad field of contemporary marathon theatre-an art form that diverse audiences of savvy, screen-weaned spectators continue to seek out, for the increasingly rare experiences of awe, transcendence, and sustained immersion that it provides.
Great Lengths will appeal to general readers as well as theatre specialists. It situates the chosen productions in various historical and critical contexts and engages with the many lively scholarly debates that have swirled around them. At the same time, it uses the productions as springboards for wide-ranging reflections on the basic purpose and enduring power of theatre in an attention-challenged, media-saturated era.
