Are plays getting shorter?

The Star’s entertainment editor put this question to Carly Maga and me recently, and at first I wasn’t quite sure what he was getting at. But then I looked back and saw the pattern: of the 21 shows I’ve reviewed since this theatre season began in September, more than 15 have been a single act long.

“There definitely has been a gradual shift from the classic three-act format with two intermissions, to a two-act format with one intermission, to an extended one-act play of 80 to 100 minutes,” says John Karastamatis, director of communications at Mirvish Productions.

Mitchell Cushman, founding artistic director of the indie company Outside the March, affirms the “stereotype of the 90-minute, three-to-four-hander Canadian play.” Plays running at 70 or 80 minutes are, according to Company Theatre’s co-artistic director Philip Riccio, “a newer phenomenon,” perhaps connected to the fact that “most of our playwrights come up through the Fringe festivals”; the majority of Fringe shows need to come in at under an hour.

This brevity is also reflected in a tendency toward stripped-down titles: Infinity, Sequence, Slip, Gray, Reflector, Daughter, trace and Cake are all new Canadian plays I’ve reviewed in 2017.

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Economic realities are a factor, confirms Joanna Falck, literary manager of the Tarragon Theatre. “Playwrights are told (or believe) that their plays can only have maximum four people and one set, and they end up writing these smaller plays in order to get produced.”

But that’s not to say that Canadian playwrights can’t or won’t write big. Falck says that when she became literary manager of the Shaw Festival in 2007, she approached a number of writers asking if they had ideas for that organization’s major stages. “I found a lot of the time, writers had that big play in their bottom drawer, or that big play idea that they just never thought they’d be able to do because it didn’t seem realistic.”

No one I spoke to about this question argued that shorter automatically means lesser, but rather pointed to different factors that may be shaping writers’ tendency to scale down: TV’s capacity to compact a full story arc into an hour or less; audiences’ increased ability to embrace fragmented, postmodern storytelling forms; and the pace and intensity of contemporary life, in the midst of which a short blast of fiction may be exactly what audiences crave.

Brian Quirt, artistic director of Nightswimming Theatre and director of the Banff Centre Playwrights Lab, says that 10 years ago when he was dramaturge at Factory Theatre, there were concerns about whether one-act plays really gave audiences their money’s worth. He senses a shift in the intervening years: “Audiences seem grateful for the distilled, dense experience” of a long one-act play, he says. “The concentration is one of its great satisfactions.”

Mikaela Davies acknowledges that economic factors have shaped her and co-creator Polly Phokeev’s choice to create a trilogy of 45-minute plays in site-specific, intimate locations (such as, most recently, a storage locker). “You can rehearse a short play more thoroughly in two weeks than a longer piece.”

But Davies also underlines that their producing realities and creative approach go hand in hand: their plays depict intimate, pivotal personal moments happening in real time. “We never want to have theatrical time jumps,” she explains, an approach that “lends itself to shorter theatre.”

Davies and Phokeev are some of a number of Canadian theatremakers who are finding innovative ways to break big-vision projects into smaller pieces. Anita Majumdar can perform her Fish Eyes Trilogy, three solo shows about different girls at the same high school, as separate works or all together, as was the case this autumn when Nightswimming’s production (directed by Quirt) played at Factory Theatre.

Donna-Michelle St. Bernard’s ongoing project is nothing less than a theatrical account of every country in Africa (54 in all), which she is writing and producing over a span of years, the most recent being Cake, which premiered last month at Theatre Passe Muraille.

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Shorter doesn’t always mean better, several of my interviewees point out. “I’ve had some of the longest experiences of my life watching 60-minute plays,” says Cushman.

He is one of several Toronto-area artistic directors who gravitate toward longer-form work: “I’m a fan of us stretching the limits of the space Canadian theatre aspires to fill,” Cushman says.

This usually means that Outside the March works with other organizations, as with Sarah Ruhl’s Passion Play, a four-hour viewing experience co-produced in 2013 with Convergence Theatre and Sheep No Wool; and the three-act musical Mr. Burns, produced in 2015 with Crow’s Theatre and Starvox Entertainment.

While Riccio says he “doesn’t think about time at all when I’m choosing a play,” he does acknowledge that most of Company Theatre’s productions have been on the longer side, notably its most recent offering, Annie Baker’s John, which was three hours long with two intermissions — and won pretty much every possible theatre award this year.

Viewing patterns shaped by Netflix worked in the production’s favour, Riccio says. The structure of John “mimicked binge watching. Each of the three acts were 50 minutes, pretty much the length of a television program. So it was like people would watch an episode, get up, grab a snack and stretch their legs, and come back to watch another.”

John is an American play and Baker one of that country’s most talked-about theatre scribes. It is perhaps notable in this context that the 2017 Tony Award winner for Best Play, Oslo by J.T. Rogers, was the longest nominee by a long shot, running at nearly three hours, and was praised by the New York Times’ Ben Brantley for being “as expansive and ambitious as any (play) in recent Broadway history.” Might big be back, in the States at least?

Holding to their principles, Outside the March and Company Theatre are currently collaborating on another contemporary epic: Jerusalem by Jez Butterworth, which enjoyed huge success in London, England, in 2009 and transferred to Broadway, clocking in at three hours with two intermissions. It starts performances at Streetcar Crowsnest on Feb. 13.

Commercial theatres in Britain have resisted the move toward shorter plays, in part because bar sales tend to go down when there’s no intermission. Vicky Hawkins, head of producing at London’s National Theatre, confirms that West End theatre landlords usually add a “no-interval charge” to producers’ contracts when a one-act show is proposed.

The same does not hold at Mirvish, says Karastamatis. “Bar sales are never considered” in Mirvish’s choice of material, he says, pointing out that several offerings in their current season — the plays Disgraced and Salt-Water Moon, and the musicals Come From Away and Fun Home — are one-acters.

“After all, if a play doesn’t work for a large enough audience, it doesn’t matter whether it has an intermission in which we can sell drinks and snacks, because we won’t have enough customers in the theatre for it to make any difference to the bottom line.”

Karen Fricker is a Toronto Star theatre critic. She alternates the Wednesday Matinée column with Carly Maga.