The Twelve-Hour Dostoevsky Theater Experience

A 12-hour-long incredibly faithful adaptation of Dostoevsky’s 900-page novel The Demons sounds like a great thing. The only problem with this 12-hour-long incredibly faithful adaptation of Dostoevsky’s 900-page novel would be that it’s in Italian.

Still, makes for interesting reading:

The event actually lasted almost 14 hours from the time we boarded the ferry in Manhattan to the time we disembarked at around midnight. There were four short intermissions, and the coffee-hyped crowd ran to wait in line for the tiny trailer-bathrooms. A concession stand sold coffee at one end and beer at the other, and for those beyond the help of stimulants or depressants, an usher offered an early ride back to Manhattan. Like many of our fellow audience members, Anne and I started with coffee and migrated towards alcohol as the day wore on. For a lot of us, the highlights of the day were the two additional breaks for meals served at long tables, covered by awnings – an assortment of sandwiches for lunch; pasta, salad and berry pies served family-style for dinner. Anne thought she recognized someone sitting near us – it turned out to be Mark Bittman, who wrote a blog entry focusing entirely on the food. At these meals audience members confessed to each other their motives for spending upwards of $175 and 14 hours on Stein’s Dostoevsky. The only reasonable point of comparison was a wedding: “Are you here for the Italian or the Dostoevsky?” A disproportionate number of us seemed to be writing reviews. But the woman sitting next to us at dinner wished she had brought her sons. She loved learning about Russian history. She had also loved New York’s big theatrical event of three years ago – Tom Stoppard’s The Coast of Utopia, a trilogy that she had seen twice in its entirety. (The glint in her eye reminded me of an ultramarathoner I had once met in St. Petersburg who claimed that running 100 K is much easier in the winter.)

I would sit through all of Stoppard’s Coast of Utopia (and, yes, alcoholic concessions would be a great idea), but I think it’s not likely that any of the theaters around here would do a staging of the whole thing.

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