One Size Doesn't Fit All

Wednesday, December 11, 2024

When you’re stepping outside the well-trodden path and trying to create something new, you often have to find inspiration outside of the discipline itself. I have found inspiration in unlikely places: books on local economics, environmentalism, small business practices, where I’ve found ideas that make me think about theater differently. A while back, for instance, I read Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things by William McDonough and Michael Braungart. I remember being particularly intrigued by a segment entitled “One Size Fits All,” in which architecture and detergent became an apt metaphor for what has happened to the theater.

The authors discuss the Industrial Revolution’s underlying design assumption that “universal design solutions” (the titular one size fits all) could be implemented to improve the world. McDonough and Braungart use the examples of International Style architecture and mass-produced detergent to illustrate the flaw in this orientation. I think it is worth quoting at length in order to fully understand that what has happened to the arts is not an isolated and unique historical development that was “organic” and “natural,” but rather part of a larger social movement resulting of a particular way of relating to the world.

In architecture, their was the International Style developed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Walter Groupius, and Le Corbusier:

“Their goals were social as well as aesthetic. They wanted to globally replace unsanitary and inequitable housing–fancy, ornate palaces for the rich; ugly, unhealthy places for the poor–with clean, minimalist, affordable buildings unencumbered by distinctions of wealth or class. Large sheets of glass, steel, and concrete and cheap transportation powered by fossil fuels, gave engineers and architects the tools for realizing this style anywhere in the world.”

However, the vision of the originators was debased by those who followed:

“Today the International Style has evolved into something less ambitious: a bland, uniform structure isolated from the particulars of place–from local culture, nature, energy, and material flows. Such buildings reflect little if any of a region’s distinctness or style…Buildings can look and work the same anywhere, in Reykjavik or Rangoon.”

Here’s an example of the International Style–the ugliest house ever:

Shifting to detergent, the authors write:

“Major soap manufacturers design one detergent for all parts of the United States or Europe, even though water qualities and community needs differ. For example, customers in places with soft water, like the Northwest, need only small amounts of detergent. Those where the water is hard, like the Southwest, need more. But detergents are designed so they will alther up, remove dirt, and kill germs efficiently the same way anywhere in the world – in hard, soft, urban, or spring water, in water that flows into fish-filled streams and water channeled to sewage treatment plants.”

In the interest of appealing to as large a market as possible, detergent is disconnected from its relationship to local conditions. Sound like anything you know? (Hell, to me it sounds like everything I know.)

By comping mass media and centralizing the “industry,” the “biz” (interesting words) in New York, the theater has fallen prey to exactly the same one-size-fits-all approach. Instead of visiting a theater being a unique experience seasoned with local flavor and served with pride of place–the theatrical equivalent of barbecue in Kansas City, gumbo in New Orleans, or kringle in Racine WI–theater is like going to a chain restaurant: once you’re inside the doors, you could be anywhere.

A sustainable theater should have a local flavor that comes from being marinated in the specific community. That might mean doing plays by playwrights who are part of the company, or developing a style of production that is unique, or having a company of performers and designers who live (or maybe even grew up) in the community, even just making the attendance experience non-generic.

None of this is difficult, nor does it require permission. It just requires a new orientation.