Dramatic Foundations - Computers as Theatre - page 88

Gratuitous in the Heartland
Rob and I both came from the Midwest. Sometimes we have a good laugh over
the gratuitous things that showed up in our childhoods. There was the matter of
the living room. You are not allowed to sit in it unless there are guests. This is a
vestige of the 19th-century sitting room. When sitting rooms disappeared from
domestic architecture, some of their meaning migrated to the living room. Then,
with no place to sit, later suburbanites began to have family rooms that actually
functioned as living rooms. Rules and customs can migrate over time, even when
they become gratuitous .
Some of our relatives put plastic covers on the sofa. Sometimes people put
little plastic runners over the carpet where there was a lot of foot traffi c. Sitting
on a plastic cover in shorts in the summer is an experience I hope never to re-
peat. You have to peel yourself off the furniture and hope not to lose any skin
in the process. Granted, putting plastic covers on things was not gratuitous to
the women who did it—it saved them cleaning time and effort. But the custom
functioned to prevent consequences of actions —something we don't want to do
in plays or dramatic interaction.
When I go home to visit my parents' graves, the cemetery is littered with plas-
tic fl owers. There's a place behind the groundskeeper's house where decades of
plastic fl owers have been tossed into a gooey pile. You could say that plastic fl ow-
ers are just tacky, but for those who leave them there, the duties of decorating the
graves are attenuated by these long-lasting decorations. But they function to deny
the passage of time , something we also want to avoid in dramatic action. When I
visit, I leave fresh fl owers. Life is change.
Homes and barns in the Midwest sometimes include Pennsylvania Dutch
hex signs. Most of these are prefabricated, and the homeowners aren't Pennsyl-
vania Dutch. The hex signs originated as a show of cultural solidarity in Penn-
sylvania at a time when the government was trying to remove the cultural
attributes of these immigrants, also discouraging the speaking of German. The
hex signs have particular meanings. People who use them elsewhere in the
Midwest think of them simply as decorations. Here, the signifi cance of the signs
is erased . A counterexample is the current fashion of attaching metal stars to the
home. These signify a particular current political view and work as semi-opaque
signs for the initiated.