Marcia Farquhar once performed a thirty-hour monologue, thirty goddamn hours of talking, which is longer than most people can stay awake, longer than most marriages last, longer than anyone should have to listen to anyone else under any circumstances. She called it The Omnibus because apparently she wanted to get everything in there, the whole messy sprawl of whatever fills a human brain when you give it thirty hours to empty itself out.
Now she’s offering Long Haul, which is the “abbreviated version,” and you have to love the nerve of calling anything abbreviated after you’ve already proven you can monologue for longer than a full day. What’s abbreviated here? Three hours? Five? Still too long, probably, but nothing compared to the original marathon. And here’s where it gets uncomfortable for me, Farquhar’s up there talking about her childhood, her lovers, what she had for breakfast in 1987, the pattern on a curtain she once saw, looping and digressing, but suddenly she’s looking at me, talking to me, talking about me, the guy with the camera who thought he was invisible, who thought he was documenting from outside the frame.
And now I’m in it. I’m part of her monologue. I’m material. The person trying to capture the performance has become the performance, and there’s no getting out because she won’t stop, she’ll just keep talking, weaving me into whatever endless narrative she’s constructing, and my camera’s suddenly not a shield anymore, it’s a prop in her show.
