You had to have a lot of fortitude to watch French absurdist Albert Camus' 3.5-hour play

It is the birthday of French absurdist writer Albert Camus (1913), who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957. Among his books are The Outsider (1942), The Plague (1947), The Fall (1956), A Happy Death (1971), and The First Man (1995). In 1959, Camus undertook a formidable project to adapt Fyodor Dostoyevsky's book The Possessed for the stage. The play took stamina to watch. It lasted 3½ hours, had 33 actors and 26 set changes. It cost millions to produce. It ran for 180 performances.