On Theater: The long and short of one-act shows

What - or maybe who - is killing the two-act play?

If you've been to the theater much lately, you know what I mean. A nonstop 90-minute play used to be a rarity - often a nice rarity, you might agree, after a long day at work with anxiety about traffic, taxis or trains.

But the chunk of theater we used to consider normal - maybe 2 1/2 hours for a play, almost three hours for a musical - has been shrinking rapidly to less than two hours. And intermissions? Forget them. As if we don't feel infantilized enough by the small seats and toddler-sized legroom in most Broadway houses, it appears that ushers are instructed to give bathroom warnings before the show.

Already this season, the one-act is the form of choice for "The Scottsboro Boys," "A Life in the Theatre," "Driving Miss Daisy," "Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson," "Brief Encounter," "La Bête" and "Lombardi." Add these to last season's holdovers, "American Idiot" and "Million Dollar Quartet," and brevity theater is clearly a trend.

This weekend, for example, I am able to see "Colin Quinn: Long Story Short" (70 minutes) on Broadway at an innovative 5 p.m. curtain, be out in time for a relatively leisurely dinner, then head over to an 8 p.m. curtain for "The Pee-wee Herman Show" (80 minutes) and be back on the street before 9:30.

This is not a schedule I recommend on a regular basis. I'm just demonstrating that, with two light offerings, a double feature is definitely feasible.

I know I should be jumping up and down with concern about our pathetic attention spans. My conscience says I should hector about a culture that prefers tweets to writing letters, about rising ticket prices that defy customary cost-time ratios and - most seriously - about playwrights being pressured to squeeze their great big ideas in that little bitty can.

On the other hand (as Tevye used to have time to say, repeatedly, in nearly three hours of "Fiddler on the Roof"), the one-act play and musical just feel right today. Carole Rothman, artistic director of Second Stage Theatre, doesn't think playwrights feel pressured to write short. "Playwrights write as long as they need to write," she says. "Tracy Letts ['August: Osage County'] needed to write more than three hours. Others need 80 minutes." But, in general, she says, "We are getting away from a lot of exposition. Audiences don't need a lot of time to sit and hear people yap on and on. Audiences are way ahead of it. They get it fast."

When Shakespeare wrote all those five-act plays, people had fewer playthings at their disposal. Ibsen's "Peer Gynt" takes its own time in five acts, while "A Doll's House" speeds by in three. Shaw's rhythms felt best to him in four acts. O'Neill needed all four for "Long Day's Journey into Night," while Chekhov managed to say so very much in three. Edward Albee's "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" is in three (each with its own colorful title). But most of the important playwrights of the mid-20th century (including prime Harold Pinter) felt their theater flowing in halves.

So what is it about the one act, which, until recently, used to be coupled with another single in a double bill? Did we all get too lazy to process two separate thoughts, or can explanations be less judgmental?

Partly, let's credit - or, if you're so disposed, blame - two contrasting forces. The movies. And Samuel Beckett. Movie audiences have been sitting for a couple of hours without needing to stretch or get a drink or show off their clothing. To the understandable distress of Broadway's concession businesses, theatergoers seem able to do that, too.

And Beckett? As he aged, the master of our modern theater was able to say more and more with less and less. Subsequent playwrights - including David Mamet, late Pinter, Caryl Churchill - were obviously inspired by the atomized power of concision. Churchill's last play in New York, "Drunk Enough to Say I Love You," was 45 minutes long. The publicist joked that "45 is the new 90." He may be right.

Commercial plays also lean toward cinematic structures these days, with a high-concept drive and momentum that would hit the wall if everything stopped for intermission. Yasmina Reza's Tony-winning 90-minute "Art" set the stage, followed by her Tony-winning "God of Carnage." Tim Sanford, artistic director of Playwrights Horizons, observes more new plays that have "absolutely no place for an intermission." Although Annie Baker's recent hit, "Circle Mirror Transformation," ran almost two hours, "the audience needed to go into that room and stay there."

Even revivals of three-act plays are generally done today in two (lopsided) acts. Fair or not, two intermissions now feel like an imposition. Plays that make us go into the lobby to chat with strangers for two 15-minute intervals - or reconnect with cell phones, then remember to turn them off - had better have a lot to say. Of course, some plays with no intermissions just feel like desperate attempts to keep audiences from fleeing the scene.

In wild contrast is the hunger for marathons - right now, there's "Gatz," the eight-hour experimental reading of "The Great Gatsby" at the Public Theatre and the revival of Tony Kushner's seven-hour "Angels in America" at the Signature Theatre.

The 90-minute plays and the daylong endurance tests are the most satisfying. Right now, it's the in-betweeners that feel long.