Broadway’s finest hours are its longest ones

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NEW YORK — Isn’t it always a little embarrassing to ask the length of a play or musical — as if, deep down, people assume you’re asking how soon you can escape and get on with the interesting parts of life?

And isn’t it humiliating to feel your face light up when the answer is 90 minutes, no intermission, or 80, or even 75 — as if we’re pathetic slaves to shriveled attention spans?

Maybe so, but I’m here to give us all a break. It is true that many of the most popular new plays today tend to be quickies. Part of the appeal is convenience. Weary people can have an amusing time watching the all-star 90- minute “God of Carnage,” and get home before they have to leave again for work.

At least as appealing, however, is the contemporary rhythm of one-act theater. When revivals of three-act plays maintain their original two intermissions, the form feels shockingly quaint and contrived. Even a single intermission often makes the evening feel sluggish. If audiences can sit through a two-hour movie without needing a trip to the souvenir stand or somewhere else, why shouldn’t we be able to do it in the theater?

In fact, we are doing it — and much more.

Theatergoing tends to come in two sizes these days: tiny and gigantic. I’ve found lately that 90-minute plays and nine-hour marathons are the most satisfying. It’s the in-betweeners that feel long.

For the past two weeks, audiences have been packing the Park Avenue Armory to see seven hours (as single nights or in marathons) of French theater by Ariane Mnouchkine at Lincoln Center Festival. Except for the excruciating high-back wooden benches, everything about “Les Ephemeres,” which ends its run with a two-play marathon today, is riveting. On Broadway, the three-play revival of “The Norman Conquests” will almost recoup its huge investment when the limited British run ends next Sunday. According to Variety, the weekend marathon days — three plays with breaks for lunch and dinner — have outsold the single-play evenings.

Endurance theater is not new, of course. The four operas of Wagner’s “Ring” can easily run 20 hours, with intermissions but on separate days. In the ‘70s, avant-garde director Robert Wilson made huge splashes with 12-hour and 24-hour sensory spectacles at the Metropolitan Opera House.

But my first experience with commercial monster-theater was “Nicholas Nickleby,” and I’ll never forget it. The Royal Shakespeare Company brought its two-part, 8 1/2-hour Dickens adaptation to Broadway in 1982. Tickets for the whole thing were $100, considered quite a shocker at the time. The thrilling event was successful enough to be brought back four years later.

Although most plays are getting shorter, more and more people are turning out for the Big Events. In the fall comes “The Neil Simon Plays” — that is, revivals of his ‘80s semiautobiographical works, “Brighton Beach Memoirs” and “Broadway Bound.”

The Public Theater will present “The Brother/ Sister Plays,” a three-play, two-evening package by the impressive new black playwright Tarell Alvin McCraney. The Signature Theatre will devote its entire season to “The Orphans’ Home Cycle,” nine plays by the late Horton Foote. According to Variety, they will be condensed into a three-part marathon running nine hours.

Perhaps it is the allure of the siege mentality. Maybe we like the ordeal, or to have the sense of accomplishment that comes with having shared Olympic-size theatergoing with a small community.

For me, the appeal is much like the pleasure of reading a big book in a single afternoon. I love to watch characters evolve and actors transform in a whole experience.

Broadway has already proved that I’m not alone. The two parts of Tony Kushner’s groundbreaking “Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes,” won Tony Awards in the years each opened, late 1993 and early 1994. When performed together, they made an unforgettable seven hours.

Tom Stoppard’s “Coast of Utopia” — nothing less than three full-length plays about the history of Russian pre-revolutionary progressive thought — was an accomplishment of almost absurd audacity at the Lincoln Center Theater in 2006-2007.

Americans appear to be catching the epictheater bug that Europe has had for years. Theatergoers at BAM were mesmerized through 11 hours of Peter Brook’s “Mahabharata” in 1987, and 10 hours of Mnouchkine’s Greek cycle, “Les Atrides,” in 1992.

On the other hand, as they matured, Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter and Caryl Churchill have all said more and more in less and less time. Churchill’s last extended-run play in New York, “Drunk Enough to Say I Love You,” was 45 minutes long. The publicist joked, dryly, that “45 is the new 90.” That’s still making me laugh.