Making Every Second Count in Plays Too Short to Miss
Theater shrank to tiny proportions during the pandemic. Sometimes that’s a big plus.
Mia Katigbak, left, and Bernard White in Caryl Churchill’s new, very short play, “What If If Only.”Credit...Peter Kim
June 15, 2021, 6:27 p.m. ET
Forever ago, in March 2020, a press agent handed me tickets before a show and said, “Ninety minutes, no intermission, thank God.”
But those days of durational drama are gone. The pandemic has been whittling down running times as if attention spans, like paper towels, were running short. Even “Angels in America” caught the disease, showing up online in October at 50 minutes instead of the customary seven hours.