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ELEVEN O'CLOCK a lazy May morning, and the plaza at New York's Lincoln Center showed few signs of activity. The fountain hadn't even been turned on yet. But just off the main plaza, inside the Vivian Beaumont Theater, a capacity audience milled about like a group of trekkers preparing for prolonged exile from civilization. The fastidious, ordinarily reluctant to queue publicly for the toilets, manoeuvred brazenly for a better place in the lines that snaked their way through the marble lobby. Those who finally gained access to the washrooms gravitated towards the sinks as towards a pool in the desert, splashing faces with water, applying compresses of wet paper towels to the backs of necks, and filling water bottles that would have to be smuggled past the eyes of watchful ushers. Some entered the theatre with copies of the New York Times tucked under their arms, ostensibly to while away the intermissions, but more likely to provide a little padding for the theatre seats. Others, scorning half-measures, brazenly hauled pillows from home. Before the curtain, instead of reading program notes, we strategized our food intake. Should we pre-order from the theatre's concession stand or take our chances and venture further afield during the meal breaks? Given those washroom lineups, did we dare have a cup of coffee? Cell-phone users, knowing that, except for breaks, they would be unconnected for the next twelve hours, huddled disconsolately in corners, chattering until the house lights dimmed. The torments of the smokers, banished to the outside of the building, could only be imagined.
A ghostly camaraderie would establish itself as we sat, play after play, with the same people, in the same seats in the theatre. Whether we chatted tentatively with strangers or remained politely aloof, we would nevertheless feel connected in a test of endurance we had willingly chosen, for which, indeed, we had paid handsomely. We were embarking on one of the marathon Saturdays of Tom Stoppard's The Coast of Utopia, a trilogy of full-length plays first produced in London in 2002 and given their American premiere by Lincoln Center Theater in 2006-2007. Voyage, Shipwreck, and Salvage had been running in repertory throughout the season, but for Stoppard fanatics, the marathon day offered the opportunity to see all three in one sitting, roughly nine hours of theatre spread out over twelve, with one intermission in each play and two extended meal breaks in between. As one wag put it, like Wagner without the music.
WHAT could induce a group of rational beings to subject themselves voluntarily to such a test of their physical and intellectual capacities? There were easier ways to see the trilogy, after all, and manifestly pleasanter ways to spend the first glorious Saturday in May than in a darkened theatre. For me, it was compulsion--compulsion to experience the full brunt of this most recent manifestation of the Stoppard theatrical personality, compulsion to pay homage to a career I have followed since he first came to international attention some forty years ago with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. Since then, my fascination with Stoppard, though passionate, has been intermittent, an affair pursued at intervals rather than a lifelong fidelity. Casual contact heightened the excitement. Except for The Coast of Utopia, I have...
NOTE: All illustrations and photos
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More articles from Queen's Quarterly
Talmudic thought and the pleasures of disputation., September 22, 2007
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Breaking on the wheel.(Short story), September 22, 2007
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