![]() ![]() My concern is an art form that doesn’t always seem in sync with modern life. Here are a few of the reasons I hate intermissions: They force you to make dinner reservations that are either too early or too late they add to the already maddening crowd control problems they disrupt the dramatic flow and, perhaps most important of all, they encourage playwrights to pad rather than to hone their works. But the practice is a holdout from an era when people had discrete work hours, less harried commutes and minds that were free of Facebook, Twitter and email nudges. The stretching out of plays by intermissions might make sense for producers worried about the sales revenue of overpriced food and drink. But it’s in the more pretentious reaches of the commercial theater - the haute middlebrow, if you will - that mid-20th century Broadway traditions are still the default. An assumption persists that longer works have more range and ambition, as if depth were a function of backside penance.Īnyone who has read the ancient Greek tragedians, Samuel Beckett or Caryl Churchill knows what can be achieved in an unbroken act of inexorable drama. Plays without intermissions may be gaining in popularity, but the convention of two acts separated by 15-minutes of lobby dithering is still deeply entrenched. Where has common-sense etiquette gone? The other day a woman seated next to me spent the first 15 minutes of the show trying to figure out how to turn off her blindingly bright phone.īut I’m not here to complain about crinkling candy wrappers or the acoustical battles between hearing aids and assisted listening devices. Theatergoing, like air travel today, is expensive without being luxurious. And some of the greatest highs I’ve had in a theater have come from Wagnerian operas that threatened to never end.īut there are times when an usher informs me that the new play I’m about to see is 2 ½ hours long and I feel like an animal whose cage door is being slammed. I’ve seen more revivals of “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” than episodes of “Friends.” I am a devoted student of Shakespeare, whose plays are spread over five long acts. Ask me while stuck in traffic on my way to the Mark Taper Forum or the Geffen Playhouse what my favorite dramatic genre is and I’ll likely say, “90 minutes, no intermission.”ĭon’t judge me. The vogue for shorter plays is undeniable. ![]() I had no personal knowledge of the author, but I instantly recognized the sentiment. Recently while scrolling through Facebook, I came across the lament of a playwright who was distressed that the new play he was writing seemed to require an intermission. ![]()
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