Your play is too long
Your play is too long, and other unhelpful things you can say
In the past year since theaters have opened back up I have worked on productions in the US and the UK; I’ve worked on shows at theaters with 60-million-dollar budgets as well as 4-million-dollar budget organizations; I’ve worked on musicals and plays and plays with music and experimental theater pieces; I’ve worked with nonprofit producers and commercial ones. And I have heard one note repeated more often than any other, from producers to artists, in nearly every rehearsal room I’ve been in, almost without fail: Your play is too long. Can you cut a half hour? Can you cut 20 minutes? I’m worried about the length of the experience. Now listen, I think this note can come from a place of care. Theater producers know that in this strange post (ish) pandemic era theater audiences have not returned in numbers that they were at in the before times. Producers are worried about anything that might scare off an audience, such as a long theatrical experience. There is a worry that audiences are covid conscious and might hesitant to be in a theater for a longer time period, and thus putting themselves at greater risk. So, a shorter play could get more audiences, and prevent those audiences from leaving before the end. That is the theory.
I’ve noticed another thing in the last year. Artists are writing long ass pieces of art. Forget three hours – my most beloved artists are working on 4-hour, 6-hour, 10-hour pieces. This is what artists are being drawn to; the durational, the epic, the long arc. Is this any surprise? We just experienced a pandemic, like yesterday, that if you just looked at one day, was not so bad, but as the days added up became completely intolerable. This taught us something about the cumulative nature of time. Television has shown us the power of telling a little bit of a story at a time, adding up to A LOT of story, stories that take years to tell and keep audiences coming back for more. Even our movies are all part of series or creating universes out of dozens of films. And not for nothing, the world is a mess – have you noticed? Politics and the regression of the rights of trans people and women and queer people and black people – fascism is on the rise even as our seas are. These are times for big thoughts. And artists have noticed. And they are delivering them. And the producers are blanching. Does it really have to be SO epic? In their defense, who among us doesn’t like a 90 min play? I mean, tell me a play has a 70 min running time and I’ll kiss the usher. I just wanna get home and get under my covers. But is this a good impulse on my part? And is an impulse that theater producers should feed? What’s the line between making an audience comfortable and catering to their base desires? When is it a theaters job to push its audience to grow?
In the end I can say one thing for certain, telling an artist that their play is too long is a bad note. It’s not an artistic note, but a technical one. And it’s an incredibly hard note to respond to. I’ve seen so many artists stumble, get frustrated or just plain mad at hearing this note. And for good reason. When we give notes to artists we should talk about their work, not an audience reaction that they can’t control, an audience reaction that frankly, producers are GUESSING AT. They don’t know, they THINK audiences don’t want to see long work. They might be wrong. So, giving this note puts an artist in the position to do something not artistic, but technical – you are asking them to arbitrarily cut their script to make it shorter. This makes for not only a bad working environment for artists, but also bad art.