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Some art sets out to make its audience uncomfortable on purpose, and treats that discomfort as something to measure out in the right dose. A work can succeed exactly by leaving people uneasy rather than entertained.
In a film the maker forces viewers to look exactly where he wants. On a stage crowded with people who have no particular part, the audience doesn't know where to look, so the stage is freer but also more limited in what it can make people see.
Sitting in a theatre suspends a person's everyday reality, and that distance lets him look back over the sad events of his own life. A viewer can take far more from a slow drama than it seems to offer, because he fills the stillness with himself.
Staging long stretches where nothing happens, such as a ticking clock or a string of small, dull events in order, forces the audience to live through time the way a bored or waiting person does. The 'boredom' becomes the experience the work is about, which is why it can be called both the most boring and an unsettling work.
For many old people the deepest pain is not illness but being pushed aside by their own families and then forgotten. Their shared complaint is the hurt of being left alone in the world.
Seeing strangers bedridden and helpless turns quickly into fear for oneself and for the people one loves. The spectator stops judging the scene and starts picturing his own body, and his wife's, on that bed.
Storytellers are trained to believe everything in a scene must serve the story. Work that deliberately includes irrelevant people and pointless moments breaks that rule, and the viewer's irritation shows how deeply the rule has been absorbed.