A DICKENS OF A TIME FOR A SKEPTIC

“The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby” ends its Los Angeles stay Saturday, and my regret at having caught up with it late in the run is that I won’t have a chance to see it again.

You wouldn’t think that an event which can keep you in the theater for 9 1/2 hours, including intermissions, is an item of repeat business. (Seeing the play can be divided over two days; I have to guess that the unified exposure has more impact.)

Yet, even allowing for the skepticism that builds within you after hearing all those raves, “Nicholas Nickleby” still turns out to be a theatrical experience of a lifetime, which can be enjoyed more than once in a lifetime, I have no doubt.

Paradoxically, the trickiest fate a play, a film, an album, a book, an appearance can have is to be launched with rave reviews and what Stan Freberg once called searing word of mouth. Too often the enthusiasm is overstated, or misleading. The customers, several times burned, become scarred skeptics.

Can “Streetcar Named Desire” or “My Fair Lady” be that good, or is some combination of hype, slavish echoing or autointoxication at work? Could anything be worth a 9 1/2-hour commitment, at $100 a seat?

Some lines in “Nicholas Nickleby” itself have sport with the questions, hinting rather wickedly that attendance may be a kind of Colonial weakness (as if the whole endeavor had not begun and prospered in the mother country).

You do arrive at the Ahmanson with high expectations, but they are lightly flavored with a subtext of “Yeah? We’ll see.” And then, of course, you do see.

There are cavils, minor. It really is a long sit, however quickly it seems to pass. The momentum is not quite so headlong in the second half as in the first, and there are a couple of episodes that you feel, treasonably, could be swiftened or done without. (But the most affecting scenes are also in the second half.)

There is--surprising in so well judged and polished an ensemble--the odd passage of strenuous overacting, with a resulting garble of pace and accent that strains comprehension. After all that has gone before, the action seems to conclude not at a peak but at a plateau paved with endings, as if the company no less than the audience were reluctant to see things be finished.

And yet these quarrels really are quite minor. They are in fact overwhelmed by the central truth about “Nicholas Nickleby,” which is that it creates a bonding between the company and the audience that is unique in my experience.

(Part of the bonding derives from the picnic atmosphere on weekends when both parts of the play are given. The checkroom has enough hampers for a Princeton-Rutgers game, and in the hour break between halves the environs of the Ahmanson have been festive and collegial.)

There are moments when the audience, possibly giddy with fatigue and intermission wine, hisses the villainies and cheers the defiant heroes, recalling “The Drunkard” and other Victorian melodramas.

But the real participation is subtler and deeper. It is a kind of shared awareness that players and witnesses are linked in a unique celebration, a piece of theater (a large piece of theater) not likely to come along again.

It is hardly the first theater work to invade the audience and have players shout from the back or rush on from the orchestra. But after the noisy shallowness of the roller-skating “Starlight Express” in London and the musical banalities of “Cats,” for example, it is instructive and historic to see what the same monumentality of production can come to when it has the material to match.

What I had not expected from “Nickleby,” but should have, was its variety of tone, from the wondrous farce of a touring company’s “Romeo and Juliet,” with its improved happy ending in which only Tybalt stays dead, to a choral moment, gray, expressionistic and affecting, that is a pure Dickensian threnody on the poor.

At times the stage boils with the full cast of nearly three dozen in furious activity. At other times, there is what I think of as a daring and spacious stillness, a figure or two on a quiet, bare stage amid the immensity of the surrounding multilevel set.

The mocked Shakespeare suggests “Noises Off” or an Aldwych farce; the lurking vision of poverty and meanness seems, now and again, Dickens according to Brecht.

The staging by the co-directors Trevor Nunn and John Caird is continually surprising and energetic, an anthology of the craft. Actors with chairs become an omnibus; actors swaying are indubitably on a lurching carriage heading south from Yorkshire; actors without chairs become a line of attached houses. Astonishment is achieved as a steady state.

Dickens is, of course, the mighty engine that makes it all move. It’s hard to think of another English author this side of Chaucer who could justify the scale of the production. But Dickens’ ceaseless powers of invention--comical, tragical, romantic--and his raging angers, voiced as satire, at the social inequities and abuses of his time, fill the day . . . and the night.

Even in the last week of what has to be an exhausting, life-monopolizing run for the cast, the production retains an amiable freshness, with only occasional hints that the comedy turns have been allowed to broaden even beyond Dickens. It is as if, for the most part, these were still early days, the pleasure of performance not yet staled by repetition.

There is no curtain, and at the intermissions cast members wander about the theater. It might not work at a less protean and more intense and claustrophobic drama, but the relaxed camaraderie is part of the bonding of players and viewers that helps make “Nicholas Nickleby” the magical marathon encounter that it is.

It is, no question, one of the milestones by which the theater will have to be calculated forever after.