Theatre Marathon: The Great Game

I recently saw Tricycle Theatre's production of The Great Game: Afganistan at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre. Depending on how you classify it, The Great Game is a single day-long play, three full-length plays, or nineteen short pieces on the topic of Afghanistan's history and politics. I attended one of the "marathon performances," in which a full day - 11:00 AM to 10:30 PM - was surrendered to the act of audiencing.

Submitting to a full-day play requires great trust: in the company, the director, the playwright, and the actors. You hope they'll take good care of you, both artistically and physically, and that your investment in this illusory world will be worthwhile. The Great Game definitely was. While I try to stay engaged in global politics, it's hard to understand the present without the historical context, and CNN rarely takes the time to explain the myriad effects of the last 150 years of colonialism in Central Asia. The production educated me in that alchemical way that only art can, and raised as many questions as it answered, putting the responsibility in my hands to deepen my own understanding of this country about which I know only little.

The theatre marathon format is growing increasingly common. Elevator Repair Service's 7-hr Gatz is at the Public right now, and a marathon version of Tarell Alvin MacCraney's Brother/Sister Plays was produced there last year. I saw Ariane Mnouchkine's Les Ephemeres last summer at Lincoln Center, and Signature Theatre is reviving Kushner's Angels in America in marathon-format next spring.

Personally, I love the experience of giving myself over to a day of near-passive observation. My intense critical eye usually gets tired after the first few hours and my way of viewing changes. It's not so much that I get wrapped up in the action of the play, but I begin to feel like this life in the darkened theatre, surrounded by a temporary community of quiet, watchful viewers, is my new reality. In the shared space of the audience, my ego boundaries start to soften like food over the heat of a fire.

The meditative time signature of the theatre marathon allows me the luxuries of observation, contemplation, and openness to difference that seem impossible in the active rumble of life itself. My obsession with my own small dramas is subsumed into the grand, shared pageant passing before me, and in that shifting experience of time, self, and community, I can't help but sense, at the corners of my tired vision, the overwhelming beauty of the enormous, ultimately unknowable world.