Technology problems in theatre are difficult and complex. Consider a production of Iphigenia and Other Daughters one of my graduate students is working on at the moment: the set includes four large, rolling wall units, 10’ wide by 2’ deep by about 17’ tall (they look a little like eroded stone at the top, so the height varies a bit). Not a big deal to make them roll around—just put them on wheels. But for this production, the team has envisioned that at the opening of the play, each of these units will be lying on one of the 17’ long sides, and will have to tip up onto the 10’ wide bottom face a vista. Things just got crazy! How do you go about solving this problem as a technical director? There are a million different considerations to address when developing a way to achieve this vision (okay, not a million, but quite a few). Where do you start?

Before we get too far along that line of thought, consider: how do you learn how to solve a problem like this? We use all kinds of terms to talk about a design problem like this: “non-traditional,” “requires outside the box thinking,” and more; there is no one “right” solution to this problem, but potentially six dozen solutions that address one or more of the considerations to a greater or lesser degree. You can’t learn the solution to a problem like this one in the classroom; there’s no chapter in Michael Gillette’s Theatrical Design and Production that talks about tall, rolling scenic units that have to pivot from being oriented in “landscape” to “portrait.” However, these are the kinds of set design projects that totally excite me as a technical director; I want my students to see a problem like this and be more excited by the prospects than they are intimidated by the process of figuring out how to make it happen.

As we looked at last week, this is exactly the kind of problem that a lot of students tend to freak out about: there’s no one solution, no one right way to address the problem. It is a so-called “ill-structured” or “real-world” problem, and many of our contemporary students (some research, and my personal experience suggests) have been conditioned by a lifetime of standardized tests, personal tutors, and helicopter parents to be completely unprepared for these kinds of problems. If there’s no “correct” answer that we can look up or memorize, than how do we solve it? I think this is the fundamental problem we face as technical theatre instructors: teaching students how to solve problems like this one—because when it comes down to it, most of the time technical theatre problems are just like this one: outside-the-box, non-traditional, and with no simple solutions.

The Iphigenia walls above include a structures problem (did I mention that a portion of one of these walls has to “fall out” and become a platform?) a mechanical design problem (how to make these things pivot), a construction methods problem (what to build them out of to make them light enough to pivot—I mentioned that preferably the action of pivoting these would be actor-driven, right?), and a drafting problem (how to draw these complex units in such a way that they can be built). The student working on the project has taken two semesters of structures with me, so he knows how to mathematically analyze loads, stresses and materials. We’ve gone over how to analyze the forces required to pivot a rectangular shape on one corner based on its weight. He knows how to draft. If you were to give him a test in which he were asked to “solve” any of these kinds of problems, he would fare incredibly well—he’s very smart.

But in a situation like this one, where the solution isn’t, “how large a load can this platform carry,” or “how much force is required to pivot this wall,” this student has come up against a wall: he has had a lot of difficulty knowing how and when to deploy all of these skills to address a complex problem with no simple, single solution. And he’s not the only student who struggles this way: nearly all of my students struggle with this when they enter the program (or when I see them as undergraduate students). These students don’t have a process for solving ill-structured problems; more important (and more frightening), they neither know they don’t have a process, nor realize they need one!

There are a number of instructional design methodologies out there that address how to prepare students for ill-structured, real-world problems like those we face in technical theatre all the time. In essence, they boil down to a fundamental idea: don’t teach solutions, teach methods. Don’t teach answers, teach processes. These approaches emphasize learning how to think about the problem in front of you, determining what skills in your repertoire you need to deploy to address the problem, and when and how to deploy them. They are intended to help students integrate knowledge and apply skills to particular situations. At the most fundamental, these instructional methodologies begin with providing a “problem solving method”: a systematic, methodical approach to solving “ill-structured” problems. (Some instructional methods go so far as to incorporate when and how students are taught particular skills and techniques within the structure of a methodical approach.)

In the case of the student working on the Iphigenia walls, this is the first project he’s worked on that has absolutely required him to deploy the problem solving approach we’ve been learning in my classes. Inexperience with the method and maybe even a little mistrust of it led to him being a little paralyzed at moments, not knowing what to do next on the project. However, reinforcing the problem-solving approach by working through it together led to some great solutions to the problem. I think the production is going to look great and the walls are going to function beautifully. More importantly, I think this student has come to trust his own ability to methodically approach a complex, multi-faceted problem with no singular solution.