is an intermission necessary to the audience experience?

Short answer: no.  An intermission is never necessary when writing a play.  It’s a choice, and often a practical one rather than an artistic requirement.

Historically, intermissions existed for very concrete reasons.  Candles needed trimming, audiences needed to be refreshed, scenery had to be reset, and theaters were social spaces as much as artistic ones.  Those traditions linger, but they don’t obligate you as a writer.  Many great plays are designed to run straight through because the momentum, pressure or emotional continuity would be damaged by a break.

From a storytelling standpoint, an intermission only earns its place if the play wants a rupture.  It can function like a hinge: the world before the break and the world after are fundamentally different.  The classic model is revelation or reversal at the end of Act One — something so destabilizing that the audience needs time to absorb it.  In that sense, an intermission is less a pause than a structural scar.

In contemporary practice, especially in smaller theaters, intermissions are often discouraged.  They risk losing the audience physically and psychologically, they add logistical cost, and they can flatten tension.  A 75- to 100-minute uninterrupted play has become a kind of modern default because it respects attention spans while preserving intensity.

That said, if you’re writing a longer play — two or two and a half hours — an intermission can be humane.  It allows the audience to use the restroom, to reset their bodies and their expectations, and it gives the second half a chance to feel like escalation rather than exhaustion.

A useful way to think about it is this: you don’t decide on an intermission because of length alone.  You decide because the play itself demands a breath, a reorientation or a moral recalibration.  If the story continues to tighten without relief, let it run.  If it needs to fracture, to ask the audience to sit with a question before pushing forward, an intermission might be the right wound to open.

So, write the play first. Let its internal pressure tell you whether a break belongs there.