A tale that takes little more than 90 minutes to watch on film requires more than 21/2 hours in the theater, testing patience and derrieres.
In the theater the test is not: Is this true to the realities of human experience?
It's the latest experiment in the New York theater world, testing the theory that many people are more likely to see a show if it feels like a night out clubbing.
Using mass spectrometers hooked up to the out-flowing vents of 108 movie theaters, researchers tested mixtures of 872 compounds released by 9500 moviegoers during 16 different films, including The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, Carrie, Buddy, and The Hobbit.
The residency had been mentally draining and physically demanding, with cold weather making the long days and nights of rehearsal in the open-air Pavilion theater a painful test of endurance.
Plays on a Dare (Tuesday) Taxdeductible Theater likes to test its members' creativity by challenging them to create, rehearse and then stage 10-minute plays based on anything from a thought to a phrase, over the span of eight weeks.
First, I met with two marketing reps from Dolby, who took me to the company's test theater, a room lined with ornate wood panels, thick carpets, and massive speaker systems neatly hidden behind walls of patterned fabric.
A.E.G. is using the Denver theaters as a test run, and plans to introduce the system to more theaters by the end of the year.
While partly theater, the stress tests ultimately came off as broadly realistic.
And without the theaters' cooperation, the test never got off the ground.
