If you’ve been to the theater lately, you may have noticed something missing: the intermission.

The musical “Come From Away,” about what happened in Gander, Newfoundland, when 38 planes were stranded there on Sept. 11, 2001, came and went from Kansas City’s Music Hall in February without a break in its 100 heartfelt minutes.

Ivo van Hove’s new Broadway revival of “West Side Story,” which runs an hour and 45 minutes, has been streamlined to exclude both the song “I Feel Pretty” and the original’s intermission. “I want to make a juggernaut,” the Belgian director told Vogue. “You feel that these people are running toward their death and there’s no escape from it.”

Add in Kansas City Repertory Theatre’s run of intermission-free theater – current productions “Frankenstein” and “Legacy Land,” as well as the recent Alison Bechdel musical memoir “Fun Home” – plus the Unicorn Theatre’s recent spate, and it’s clear theatergoers can no longer take it for granted that there will be an opportunity to answer nature’s call – or visit the bar – before the curtain call.

On the plus side, going to the theater on a weeknight doesn’t have to mean a bleary-eyed morning after.

“In the most practical level it’s a reflection of how busy we are, so playwrights are writing pieces that live in more concise containers,” Stuart Carden, the Rep’s new artistic director, told The Star. But there’s more to it, he said.

“There’s a movement toward creating experiences that cast a spell, putting you inside a world and inviting you to give over to that world,” he said. “Something about that break at intermission, for a lot of writers right now, undercuts their ability to cast a spell for the story they are telling.”

‘Golden age’

It used to be that with your typical play by the likes of George Bernard Shaw or Eugene O’Neill, theatergoers could count on not one, but two intermissions, Carden points out. Then plays evolved to two acts and one break – the norm for years.

“Playwrights knew to write for that format: The play drops you off at intermission, and then returns to answer the question that was posed at the intermission,” Carden said.

And now, in “a golden age of experimentation,” he said, “playwrights are dispensing with preconceived notions of what the arrangement of a story needs to be.” And theaters are giving them the freedom to do that.

In Kansas City, the Unicorn Theatre’s recent production of “Babel,” a play about one possible future driven by prenatal testing, tells “a satisfying story in 90 minutes,” said Philadelphia-based playwright Jacqueline Goldfinger.

And if there were an intermission?

Goldfinger said her story “relies on a building of pressure and momentum toward a decision. … If you’re in a high-pressure situation, and you take a break, and you let the pressure dissipate, it’s really hard to get it back.”

The Unicorn’s current production, “American Son,” as well as its next two productions, also have no intermission, said producing artistic director Cynthia Levin, who makes it her mission to seek out new, provocative plays.

The need to quickly build pressure and tension is also the dynamic with Stacey Rose’s “Legacy Land,” which opened this weekend along with Kyle Hatley’s take on “Frankenstein” as part of the Rep’s OriginKC Festival of new works.

At an hour and 42 minutes, Carden said, “Legacy Land,” is “a really compelling story about family that has revelation upon revelation, in terms of secrets of family. The way that Stacey Rose releases those revelations and builds the tension to the very surprising climax, if you had an intermission you would release that pressure valve, release that emotional tension. You wouldn’t have the same experience of cathartic release at the end if you had a break to go grab another drink.”

At one point, “Come From Away” was two acts with an intermission, but the idea to shorten and merge them came from the show’s New York producers, Junkyard Dog Productions, playwright David Hein told the Toronto Star. They pointed out that “no one who arrived in Gander got to stop the experience and step out and say, ‘How do you think it’s going?’” Hein said. “It was a continued experience and needed to go from beginning to end.”

While some producers might push for an intermission to sell drinks and merchandise, Junkyard Dog “pushed artistically because this was the right choice for the piece,” he said.

A study of the 2019-20 U.S. theater season found that of 80 new plays represented in a survey, 62% were being presented without intermissions.

Aside from artistic reasons, Leigh Goldenberg, executive director of Theatre Philadelphia, said the trend toward shorter, intermissionless shows is partly driven by finances. “What we’re encouraging our theater makers to do is to create smaller and smaller works.”

And then there’s the time/attention span issue (more on that in a bit). “We just want to get to the next thing quicker. In Shakespeare’s time your whole activity for the night was to enjoy a three-hour play, which you would stand up for,” said Goldenberg.

The long and short of it

For those who still like an evening of theater to take up the entire evening, there’s no shortage of longer shows.

“The Lehman Trilogy,” coming to Broadway in late March after sold-out engagements in London and New York’s Park Avenue Armory, has been running 3 1/2 hours, with two intermissions.

On Broadway, “The Inheritance,” Matthew Lopez’s two-part reimagining of E.M. Forster’s “Howards End,” is running 3 hours, 15 minutes, with two intermissions, for Part 1, and 3 hours, 20 minutes, with one intermission and one 5-minute “pause,” for Part 2.

“Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” on Broadway is so long it’s also broken up into two parts for two evenings of theater: Part 1 is 2 hours, 40 minutes, and Part 2 is just five minutes shorter; each has a 20-minute intermission.

“A lot of theaters are going to the other end of the spectrum,” Carden said. “Audiences are investing in those kinds of durational theater experiences.There is a lot of sense of community around them.”

So there are two trends going in opposite directions.

“If you look at what’s opening on Broadway this season, you’ve got “Moulin Rouge” and (the musical about) Tina Turner, which are two-plus hours with intermission. And then you’ve got a show as short as “Six,” which is … all but 80 minutes long,” said Frances Egler, senior director of programming and presentations for Philadelphia’s Kimmel Center, which hosts touring Broadway shows.

Kansas City’s upcoming Broadway season will include the intermission-free “The Band’s Visit” – a 95-minute multiple Tony Award winner about extending a warm welcome to accidental visitors – as well as a new “Jesus Christ Superstar” with no intermission.

The Rep’s next season will include intermission-free “The Old Man and the Old Moon,” “The Royale” and, once again, both works in the new plays festival: “Flood” and “The Vast In-Between.”

Carden says he does regret the loss of that time to socialize, “metaphoric campfire moments,” he calls them. So for “The Old Man and the Old Moon,” which Carden has been involved with for seven years, he is planning an old-fashioned “hootenanny” after the show, where audience members are invited to bring instruments and play along.

There was a time when intermissions were social occasions, “but that was a long time ago,” Egler said. “With the rise of other art forms,” things have changed. “Films can be 90 minutes with no intermission so why not a theatrical play? … What’s the length they need to tell their story?”

“We don’t make a decision on booking based on whether there’s an intermission or not.” The goal is to make sure that “whether it’s three hours or an hour-and-a-half, that (audiences are) going to leave satisfied.”

Asked about the perception that younger theatergoers might be attracted to shorter plays, “You don’t want to sound like, ‘Well, these kids can’t sit still for that,’” Egler said. “It’s how you engage them.”

“I chuckle at the idea that, like, millennials can’t sit still,” said Goldfinger. “Are you kidding me? They can sit still for hours and play games, and do board games and do entire runs of shows on Netflix.

“If you go and see some of these longer plays like “August: Osage County,” I saw that and it was almost all a millennial audience and nobody breathed for three hours,” she said. “It has nothing to do with attention span.”

It might, though, have to do with how attention is paid.

“As our minds evolve, as technology evolves, we’re used to gathering in larger and larger amounts of information,” Goldfinger said. “If you go back and you read like an O’Neill classic,” it might “mention pieces of information two or three or four times to make sure the audience gets it.”

Today, “because our brains have evolved and our understanding of storytelling has evolved, we are just able to process a lot more,” she said. “We now can have a much wider breadth of diversity in our storytelling. … It’s like Netflix has come along in theater.”

Includes reporting by The Star’s Sharon Hoffmann, shoffmann@kcstar.com.