Multi-Million Dollar Mops; or The Architecture of Performance

Something I've been thinking about for a while is the intersection of architecture and performance. Most of the historical eras of theatre have an accompanying architectural style. The shape of the stage dominates most of our productions.

The Greeks

Most of what I know of Greek theatre consists of sprawling epics. Over pronounced masks, music and dancing, deus ex machina's. Huge stories to fill a huge space in a centralized location. The religious overtones showed up in the continual presence of gods. Man struggling to find meaning in a vast, difficult to understand world.

Medieval Theatre

The medieval theatre world was more fractured. Plays were just getting back on their feet. Sprawling out of the monastic rituals, they were performed where ever they could be: palaces, churches, rolling carts, what ever was clever. They became pageants. The various guilds of the day competed for the glory of the guild God. Massive structures were built by master craftsmen. Angels flying from the heaven stage to the hell pit, must have awed medieval audiences the same way a falling chandelier, or a hovering backlit witch does today. The sprawling site specific nature of medieval theatre is matched by the existing texts.

Elizabethan Theatre

The Elizabethan Theatre is where a lot of folk’s knowledge of theatre begins. Most of us think of the outdoor thrusts, like the swan and the globe. The work of Shakespeare, Marlowe, Johnson--the soliloquies and lack of scenery are a perfect fit for a small thrust. Though there were indoor theaters coming into prevalence as well.  Looking at the plays performed by children’s companies vs. what we normally see as Elizabethan it is clear that they were written for two different types of spaces.

Courtly masques begin to be performed and begin to alter how texts were written as well. Courtly masques began to reflect the spaces that were built. Soon opera arrives, and with it the Proscenium, that will dominate for the foreseeable future.

For pretty much all of the plays we remember, they were written for a very specific space.

Which brings me to today. When I was at the TCG Conference, Jonah Lehrer spoke at the keynote about several things. One caught a lot of folks' attention, on mops.  

Chad Bauman recaps it:

The story goes that Procter & Gamble decided they wanted to invent a new soap to make mopping more efficient. After several months of failed attempts to create this novel soap in house, they hired a creativity firm to work with them. The firm spent nine months studying homemakers as they mopped their floors, and in the end, they concluded that a new soap wouldn't revolutionize mopping because mopping as a means of cleaning was essentially flawed in itself. After observing one woman cleaning up coffee grounds on the floor with a damp paper towel, an idea emerged--what about getting rid of the mop entirely, and fastening a damp paper towel to the end of a stick? And the Swiffer was born.

Bauman Asks

After more than 50 years of success, where should the resident theater movement look to throw away a mop, and replace it with a Swiffer?

The Albert Theatre in the Goodman

When I was sitting in the Goodman's Albert theatre, listening to Lehrer speak, the thought that came into my head was "what if we're sitting in a 50 million dollar mop?".  The way it was told to me, The Albert was built to resemble Broadway stages, so transfers would be easier. This post is not intended to pick on the Goodman, but look at that space. It is a lot like many of the main stages across the country.

The next time you are in a theatre's proscenium main stage, look around you. Take in the height, the volume, the size of the stage and house. When is the last you saw a show that was built to fill that space. What was the last story you saw on stage that had any intention of filling that void?

The proscenium is the dominant stage of the past couple of centuries. The stages that have been built and are being used across the country don't fit the plays that are being produced. A forty-foot proscenium crushes a two-hander. People have been rebelling against the proscenium for over a century. Proscenium theatres have continued to proliferate; they've been the dominant stage format for centuries and will probably continue to be so. The problem is not in the shape of the stage. New plays are not being produced to fill those stages. And yet we continue to build them. The stages get larger, the houses get larger--the casts and scope of the stories have gotten smaller. There is a profound disconnect between the most visible houses, and the most visible plays.

What if many of the problems that are frequently cited are as simple as a disconnect between architecture and performance? A disconnect between audiences and houses? A disconnect between scale and scope?