BY DESIGN

I work for the Salvadori Center, an educational not-for-profit that uses the design of the built environment for an interdisciplinary project-based study of math, science, social studies, language, art, and technology. By "built environment," we mean not only tunnels, bridges, and skyscrapers but also the systems - cultural, political, economic - that build the built environment. We do this K through 12 in the New York City public schools.

I'm not a "design professional" by trade or training, but one can't hang around the Salvadori staff for long - trained as they are as architects, engineers, mathematicians, and artists - without acquiring a "design point of view" about the world. In fact, I've come to the conclusion that the best way for me to make sense of the fractalcality of human life - its fractal, loose-bordered nature - is to see it as a built environment designed by deliberated choices to make things one way rather than another. "Deliberated" does not always mean rational, orderly, just, or sensical - it only means that some humans somewhere at some time set in motion processes based on whatever they thought made sense at the time.

It also means that that "sense" does not have an intrinsic moral character to it - "sense" can mean fair-minded or foul, equitable or exploitative, intelligent or stupid. The "sense" only needs to be coherent, as in "cohere," to stick together.

What does this have to do with theatre - the making of theatre, the understanding created by the making of theatre? Perhaps of all the disciplines labeled "art," theatre has the largest "built environment" component to it. Not only do we build spaces in which we present theatre, but the stage itself, the literal and the symbolic stage, is an environment designed to produce something in the people invited to populate the space during a time called "performance."

To go even further, each play performed in the designed space re-designs this space - in other words, each play creates a new built environment (usually called "the world" of the play) that, in its presentation, determines to bring the audience to someplace other than the world that careens just outside the exits.

Most theatre-making has a bias towards the production of accessible "sense," usually governed by a story-telling mechanism that aims to produce light and, if possible, something like redemption, and it makes conservative use of the built environment to do this, mostly by giving

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