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We know that size matters in many areas of human endeavor, 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, theater critic and scholar Jonathan Kalb addresses these and other questions through a close look at seven internationally prominent theater productions, including Tony Kushner'sAngels in America, Robert Wilson'sEinstein on the Beach, the Royal Shakespeare Company'sNicholas 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 theater in general, written by a passionate spectator reflecting on selected pinnacles of his theatergoing 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 ofNicholas Nickleby, for example, considers melodrama as a basic tool of theatrical communication, and the section on Peter Brook'sThe Mahabharataexplores the ethical problems surrounding theatrical exoticism. The chapter onEinstein on the Beachgrows into a reflection on the media-age status of the much-debatedGesamtkunstwerk(or \"total artwork\") and a reassessment of the long avant-gardist tradition of challenging the primacy of rational language in theater. The essay on Peter Stein'sFaust I + IIbecomes a reflection on the interpretive role of theater directors and the theatrical viability of antitheatrical closet drama. Great Lengths thus offers a remarkable panorama of the surprisingly broad field of contemporary marathon theater-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 theater 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 theater in an attention-challenged, media-saturated era.

In interview, on the 25th anniversary of the stage production of 'The Mahabharata' by the British theatre director Peter Brook, the director discusses the work. He explains his claim that he does not often think back to previous works, outlines the collaboration on the performance text with Jean-Claude Carrière, examines the issues around Western comprehension of Easter spirituality and religion, likens the events of the election of the American president Barack Obama to the story of the play, and analyses the formal investigations in his production. He details his belief in the importance of naïvety in creative practice, and concludes by answering claims that he exploited Indian culture in the work.

Kalb discusses about Samuel Beckett, who was the most reconsidered dramatist in history. Beckett's continuing relevance has been the explicit or implicit for an unbroken string of articles, essays, and books that date back to the 1960s. Kalb states that Beckett's dramatic works have always shown up the quality of ambition in those who produce them and the depth of expectation in those who attend.

The Mahabharata was Peter Brook's eleven-hour stage adaptation of the massive, epic cornerstone of Hindu literature, religion and culture, originally produced in French in 1985 and performed in English for a 1987 world tour that included the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Majestic Theatre. In in interview, Brook discusses the play.

THE AVANT-GARDE, if it can still be said to exist, has become a very large and diverse theatrical category. The term is slung about like a smiley-face emoticon in the information age, a generic token of mild excitement that serves equally well to flatter narrative and nonnarrative performance, extravagant multimedia work and bare-stage purism, respectful adaptation and high-handed deconstruction, as well as every conceivable attitude toward acting from the virtuosically professional to the defiantly amateurish. Internationally prominent figures like Robert Wilson, Robert Lepage, and Peter Sellars, who command multi-million-dollar budgets and work at rich and prestigious institutions, are avant–garde.

IT IS OFTEN SAID that the early novels of Charles Dickens are fairy tales: childish fantasies where good and evil are instantly recognizable and unambiguous; bland, unmemorable cutout figures embodying pure innocence endure heartrending trials devised by only slightly more realistic villains; and happy endings are brought about by improbable good luck and magical coincidence. This is a partial truth, long purveyed as a complete truth by partisans of the harsh and ironic proclivities of modernism. Tactical childishness, however, is undoubtedly central to the perennial popularity of those books (The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, Oliver Twist, The Life

IT HAS LONG BEEN FASHIONABLE to refer to the Broadway theater as the fabulous invalid—perpetually sick with a crippling illness that never kills it. Anyone with theatergoing experience not confined to the commercial, however, knows that the truly fabulous invalid for most of the past hundred years has been the avant-garde theater. Decade after decade from the 1890s on, the succession of Euro-American avant–garde movements performed their signature act of rising miraculously from the deathbed of a predecessor, flush with rejuvenating rage at outdated practices and principles and hell-bent on implementing better ones. In retrospect, it is astonishing