Great Lengths
Seven Works of Marathon Theater
Format:Hardback
Publisher:The University of Michigan Press
Published:6th Oct '11
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"Reading this book is certainly a vigorous experience. Kalb's sense of nuance, unpredictability, and the complexity of perception brings these productions to life. He is our surrogate, our scapegoat even, enduring the length of these productions so that he can convey the essence of their power."
---Stanton B. Garner, Jr., University of Tennessee
"Jonathan Kalb takes us on a tour of monumental theater events, which flaunt the rules of economy, Aristotelian and otherwise. Kalb captures these unwieldy marathon productions by skillfully mixing personal experience and scholarly analysis. I read this engaging book in a single sitting---and came away ready to join the first theater marathon I could find."
---Martin Puchner, Harvard University
"Jonathan Kalb's Great Lengths leaps to the head of any class in theatre history. Rich with critical perspective of 'marathon' works by Peter Brook, Tony Kushner, Robert Wilson, and others, and written with panache and lucidity, Kalb's book is filled with suspense as he describes and demystifies more than the post-modern and post-dramatic haunting recent theatre. This is history as present event, embracing the Greeks, Shakespeare, and even Charles Dickens."
---Gordon Rogoff, Yale University
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's Angels in America, Robert Wilson's Einstein on the Beach, and 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 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...
"Jonathan Kalb's Great Lengths leaps to the head of any class in theatre history. Rich with critical perspective of "marathon" works by Peter Brook, Tony Kushner, Robert Wilson and others, and written with panache and lucidity, Kalb's book is filled with suspense as he describes and demystifies more than the post-modern and post-dramatic haunting recent theatre. This is history as present event, embracing the Greeks, Shakespeare, and even Charles Dickens, each essay's opening paragraph a model of precision and enthralling completeness."
—Gordon Rogoff, Yale University
George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism
* George Jean Nathan Award *“Great Lengths is a major achievement in theatre history and criticism… 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.”
—John H. Muse, Modern Drama
Winner of the George Freedley Memorial Award, Theatre Library Association
* George Freedley Memorial Award, Theatre Library Association *Winner of the George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism
* George Jean Nathan Award *"...Kalb's fine-tuned prose, his dryly witty but earnest voice and his ability to make deep connections across centuries and continents make Great Lengths a steady and exciting read. It also functions as a marvelous history of Western drama that summarizes a number of theorretical constructs from Aristotle's prescriptive Poetics to Lehman's concept of 'post-dramatic' theater."
—American Theatre
"Jonathan Kalb takes us on a tour of monumental theater events, which flaunt the rules of economy, Aristotelian and otherwise. Kalb captures these unwieldy marathon productions by skillfully mixing personal experience and scholarly analysis. I read this engaging book in a single sitting—and came away ready to join the first theater marathon I could find."
—Martin Puchner, Harvard University
"Being a theatre critic is hard work: you are tasked with cultivating an idiom robust enough to offer sustained critical contemplation, yet lively (even sparkling) enough to mediate the complex lived experience of watching, setting something of a monument in the face of theatrical evanescence and striking “a few blows against its ephemerality” (192). When the proverbial “two hours traffic” of the stage expand to eight, to ten, to days even, the task becomes daunting, and tests even the best critic’s powers. Fortunately, Jonathan Kalb is a very good critic. His book is that rare thing in theatre scholarship: a text as insightful as it is pleasurable; eloquent, sometimes elegant, and driven by the author’s enthusiasm for his subject... one could hardly ask for a more sensitive, judicious, and articulate cicerone through a long night of theatre."
--Theatre Journal
ISBN: 9780472117956
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
240 pages