2.5 Hours--runtime of the new Spiral Theatre show.

The show I’m going to tonight—Spiral Thetre’s production of Torch Song Trilogy is about 2.5 hours from open to close. That seems kind of like a long time—nearly an eighth of a day. That sounds like a lot until you consider that most films are only an hour less than that in length. Somewhere between 90 minutes and 2.5 hours, the time spent on drama start to seem excessive. The exact threshold of a person’s attention span in this day and age is uncertain. Why is it we demand instant gratification and yet we can somehow stomach a presidential election that goes on for a sizeable portion of an actual presidential term? In any case, 7:30pm t 10 at night doesn’t seem like an excessively long time to cover some 30 years in the life of a character. It’s all relative anyway . . . one moment becomes the next as action potentials fire in the wet clockwork of the brain at a sizeable fraction of 2.5 hours. It’s all relative . . .