How will she know when to stop? "I guess when there's no longer an audience.
A giant, 12-person pyramid is our grand finale and we leave with confident smiles, no longer the audience, but the center ring.
Mind you, there's still something irritating about the way nobody can move a chair without making a song and dance about it, and the 75 minutes is so wordy and visually showy that were it to last much longer the audience might expire from sensory overload.
We are no longer the audience, but now empowered as the director, the actors, the stagehands, the writers, the musicians, all conducted by us as the arbiters of meaning.
"We all hoped it would run longer, but audiences really do thirst for something new, something that will surprise them," Mr. Berlind said.
I saw the comments section as a way to destabilize the traditional writer/reader relationship – no longer did audiences need to consume an article without a true opportunity to respond.
Now that CGI no longer electrifies audiences as it once did, where bigger is not necessarily better, and where film-makers and cinemagoers favour masterpieces of a pre-digital kind, saying no to special effects looks like the way forward.
Even suburban Americans, no longer captive audiences for ersatz city centres, have not just a host of revitalised actual downtowns to choose from, but a new wave of high-design, urban-flavoured shopping malls that do away with introversion.
But he and other Democratic consultants say the work has become even more difficult as the presidential campaigns get longer, the audiences become more fractured and the attacks and counterattacks force them to churn out more and more ads.
The visual style of "Marienbad," with its use of glamorous, glazed-looking actors framed in mannerist poses within the glittering, implicitly decadent mirrored salons of a luxe European hotel, may no longer dazzle audiences that have seen it cribbed (and spoofed) by countless perfume ads and rock videos.
