For more than 15 years Jonathan Kalb has been a singularly perceptive commentator on American and European theatre. These essays and reviews, by the 1991 winner of the George Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism, set a new standard for theatre writing today. This collection begins with a brave and piercing appraisal of the state of current theatre criticism, in a section Kalb characteristically calls 'Critical Mess'. He goes on to revisit the work of Samuel Beckett, as performed in well-meaning efforts to bring it to a new, wider (TV) audience; to consider today's political theatre, particularly in the flourishing form of one-person shows; to explore the theatrical landscape of a reunited Germany, where the Berliner Ensemble is no longer a showcase for the East, and finally to cover what's going on back home in New York -- everything from 'The Lion King' and 'Dame Edna' to plays of David Mamet and Arthur Miller (new and old) and to the latest trends in the Broadway musical.

This is the first comprehensive English-language study of the world of Heiner Muller. Widely regarded as Bertolt Brecht's spiritual heir and as one of the most important German playwrights of the 20th century, Muller wrote almost all his plays in direct response to other literary works, posing ever more radical challenges to prevalent notions of originality and appropriation. In his book Jonathan Kalb analyses Muller's basic artist method: taking on the mantle of other writers and inhabiting the 'bodies' of their works like a vampire or a historically subversive virus. His artist-hosts include, among others, Brecht, Shakespeare, Artaud, Beckett, Genet and Wagner. Kalb's intention is to illuminate Muller texts by showing how they relate to the writings of his carefully chosen alter egos.

This book takes a critical look at the work of one of the twentieth-century's most influential playwrights from the viewpoint of those whose job it is to give the work life on the stage. From personal experience of over seventy productions, from interviews with numerous Beckett actors and directors, and in rare conversations with the playwright himself, Kalb addresses such fundamental questions as: is the task of performing Beckett categorically different from that of performing other forms of theatre? Is the audience's role different, and if so, how? The result is a new insight into particular problems of producing Beckett's early and late works, television plays, and prose works adapted for the stage. The book contains numerous performance photographs and an appendix of interviews with actors and directors involved in seminal Beckett productions.

We know that size matters in many areas of human endeavor, but what about works of the imagination? Why do some dramatic creations extend to five hours or more, and how does their extreme length help them accomplish extraordinarily ambitious aims? In Great Lengths, theater critic and scholar Jonathan Kalb addresses these and other questions through a close look at seven internationally prominent theater productions, including Tony Kushner's "Angels in America," Robert Wilson's" Einstein on the Beach," the Royal Shakespeare Company's "Nicholas Nickleby," and the "durational works" of the British experimental company Forced Entertainment. This is a book about extreme length, monumental scope, and intensive immersion in the theater in general, written by a passionate spectator reflecting on selected pinnacles of his theatergoing over thirty years.

The book's examples, deliberately chosen for their diversity, range from adapted novels and epics, to dramatic chronicles with macrohistorical and macropolitical implications, to stagings of super-size classic plays, to "postdramatic" works that negotiate the border between life and art. Kalb reconstructs each of the works, re-creating the experience of seeing it while at the same time explaining how it maintained attention and interest over so many hours, and then expanding the scope to embrace a wider view and ask broader questions. The discussion of "Nicholas Nickleby," for example, considers melodrama as a basic tool of theatrical communication, and the section on Peter Brook's" The Mahabharata" explores the ethical problems surrounding theatrical exoticism. The chapter on "Einstein on the Beach" grows into a reflection on the media-age status of the much-debated "Gesamtkunstwerk "(or "total artwork") and a reassessment of the long avant-gardist tradition of challenging the primacy of rational language in theater. The essay on Peter Stein's "Faust I + II" becomes a reflection on the interpretive role of theater directors and the theatrical viability of antitheatrical closet drama. Great Lengths thus offers a remarkable panorama of the surprisingly broad field of contemporary marathon theater--an art form that diverse audiences of savvy, screen-weaned spectators continue to seek out, for the increasingly rare experiences of awe, transcendence, and sustained immersion that it provides.

Great Lengths will appeal to general readers as well as theater specialists. It situates the chosen productions in various historical and critical contexts and engages with the many lively scholarly debates that have swirled around them. At the same time, it uses the productions as springboards for wide-ranging reflections on the basic purpose and enduring power of theater in an attention-challenged, media-saturated era.