Among those who quickly bought tickets on Wednesday was Steve Coats, a member of the Friends of Lincoln Center. He’s a theater director in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., who is a fan of the Dostoyevsky novel and of the production’s director, the German auteur Peter Stein, and an even bigger fan of what he called theater as an adventure. Mr. Coats said on Thursday that he relished the idea of trekking out to Governors Island and testing his stamina with the marathon performance (which will be broken up by meal and bathroom breaks).

In Mr. Coats’s view “The Demons” will be a relief from the onslaught of films, music and television shows that clutter American culture. “This will be like going on an adventurous foreign trip without needing a passport,” said Mr. Coats, who will attend with his wife, Alma Becker, a guest artist at Skidmore College. “We’ve been to Berlin and just missed a Stein production there. We were in Moscow and just missed Stein there. Our colleagues and other theater people have spoken so highly of Stein, so we want in on the conversation.”

Another ticketholder, Rajika Puri, a dancer and choreographer, said she yearned for theater and art that aspired to a fresh aesthetic, rather than the Broadway fare that rarely impresses her. What makes New York important to her, she said, is the pleasures that can be found in taking a Saturday morning subway ride to a Lower Manhattan ferry and then walking to a warehouse that will be transformed for a dozen hours by 26 European actors and a director known for his uses of timing, perception and space.

“I know my friends, and I will be asking each other: ‘Are you going? And what did you think of it?’ because it’s that sort of communal, unique experience,” Ms. Puri said. “You talk about the play, about plays as literature, about the sets, about the ideas. I look around me in those audiences and see people who crave being stimulated by art. I don’t want to be elitist, but the fact is there’s an elitism to self-education.”

Image Ivan Alovisio, left, one of the actors in “The Demons,” directed by Peter Stein, right. Credit... Andrea Boccalini

“The Demons” is different from most other popular multihour shows like “The Orphans’ Home Cycle,” now at the Signature Theater Company, and Tom Stoppard’s “Coast of Utopia” at Lincoln Center Theater in 2006-7, in that the Stein production will be performed only in its entirety; those other two shows could be seen in parts or as a marathon. Marathons tend to be the toughest ticket to come by, yet they also yield the mathematical impossibility of squaring the number of people who claim to have witnessed great cultural events with the number of seats available.