Underground theater ran midnight-length shows that critics compared to baroque painting

Evidence

Turds began around midnight and ran for hours. “I honestly thought intermission was the end of the play,” Lita Eliscu wrote in EVO, having left at 2:45 a.m. Eliscu found Turds inferior to Whores of Babylon. Voice critic Martin Washburn was entranced: The loose “plot” allowed for a sinking ship to segue into an underwater ballet, a procession of flagellants and, as a set piece, “a thickly populated brothel scene (where the costuming, superb throughout, reached a crescendo). It is very ingeniously staged, with unrelated scenes—simultaneously presented, focus shifting from one to the next, somewhat in the manner of a complex baroque painting.” (After the Gate raised its rates, Turds moved uptown to the Masque, a porno theater on West Forty-Second Street, where it ran for some months into the spring.) — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 1393