“…but oftentimes better than a master of one.”

This essay articulates my approach to theatre education and practice through a commitment to generalism as an intellectual virtue rather than a professional liability. It grows out of my liberal arts training, interdisciplinary research and practice, and more than a decade of work as an artist, teacher, and scholar. While the argument is direct, it is not intended as a polemic. Instead, I offer it as an articulation of an approach often regarded as professionally unserious, and as a framework for rethinking how theatre is learned, practiced, and understood within institutional contexts that continue to privilege specialization.

Before turning to that argument, I want to be explicit about what I mean by a theatre generalist. In practice, theatre generalists often function as integrators and orienting figures within collaborative processes. They ask questions that cut across departments, anticipate how technical or design decisions affect performance choices, and recognize when conceptual or aesthetic problems cannot be resolved from within a single specialization. Rather than defending a territory, or “staying in their lane,” they attend to relationships: between sound and space, text and movement, technology and perception, rehearsal process and audience experience. Their contribution is not speed or efficiency, but coherence and cohesiveness.

That Old Adage and the Problem of Mastery

Many of the casual conversations I have in the theatre regarding specialization v. generalism tend to arrive at the same verdict. Just as culturally our ingrained assumptions about training, expertise, and the production process begin to shake loose, the familiar cliché “jack of all trades, master of none” inevitably enters the friendly debate under the guise of conventional wisdom. For a long time, out of professional caution and a desire to remain diplomatic, I’ve refrained from tagging on the modern addendum occasionally offered as a corrective: “…but oftentimes better than a master of one.”

When left in its more familiar form though, the phrase functions as a misleading cautionary claim about knowledge. Under the “jack of all trades, master of none” logic, dividing one’s attention across multiple practices is understood to undermine mastery itself, along with the legitimacy and seriousness that mastery is presumed to confer. When it becomes the dominant model of knowledge, mastery establishes an oversimplified and arbitrary binary demarcation between knowing enough and not knowing enough within a given field. To cross the threshold from “not a master” into mastery is to treat knowledge as complete and exhaustive rather than dynamic and continually developing. Knowledge is understood as self-sufficient within a bounded domain rather than contextual and formed in relation to other perspectives and practices.

To the master, knowing is domination that privileges control over responsiveness, certainty over interpretation, and possession over participation. Mastery does not describe sustained engagement with a field so much as it authorizes one to operate within it without further interrogation, positioning curiosity and critical inquiry as signs of insufficiency, or evidence that a subject or skill is yet to be mastered.

Mastery, Capitalism, and the Division of Labor

It is not incidental that the logic of mastery mirrors that of capitalist production. To master something is to render it efficient, predictable, and usable, to extract value through control. Knowledge, like labor, can then be optimized through specialization and divided into manageable units.

Formalized in the principles of scientific management that shaped American industrial labor in the early twentieth century, specialization deconstructed complex processes into discrete tasks. Expertise was narrowly distributed, and authority was centralized in those who designed and oversaw the system rather than those who executed its parts. Knowing was separated from doing, and value was measured in terms of efficiency, reliability, and control.

Displaced was an older model of craft labor in which expertise was not confined to a single, isolated function. Artisans and tradespeople developed knowledge through sustained, embodied engagement with an entire process.

Like many practices shaped by economic measures of success though, the American theatre absorbed the modern logic of division of labor. Acting, directing, design, dramaturgy, and technical work came to be treated as distinct and largely autonomous functions, each trained, evaluated, and legitimized in isolation. The production process became an exercise in coordination rather than synthesis, and fluency across roles was often discouraged in favor of clearly bounded responsibilities.

When the theatre-making process is organized around shortened rehearsal periods and financial efficiency, specialization offers a way through the system quickly and reliably. Time becomes a cost to be minimized rather than a condition for artistic understanding or engagement, and any time-demanding inquiry inevitably gives way to execution.

Specialization, Generalism, and Legitimacy

Specialization, as it’s developed in the American theatre, follows naturally from these models of mastery and division of labor. It treats knowledge as a fixed target, one that can be located, aimed at, and struck with sufficient precision. Generalism, by contrast, recognizes that the target of understanding is not fixed at all, but continually shifting, shaped by context, relation, and encounter. The generalist does not aim for a single, stable bullseye, but learns to orient themselves by attending to multiple surrounding points, using relation rather than enclosure to locate meaning.

Within institutions organized around mastery, specialization functions less as a description of understanding than as a test of legitimacy, a way of sorting whose work counts as valuable and whose does not.

I am frequently the lone generalist in the room, a position that, when acknowledged, often produces a mix of surprise and confusion. For many, it seems irrational to pursue the skills required to solder 22-gauge cable connections for LED installations, sculpt clay molds for latex masks, and then turn toward performing Shakespeare’s Friends, Romans, Countrymen through the classical rhetorical framework and public speaking techniques outlined in Cicero’s De Oratore. The breadth of my work is often read not as coherence, but as diffusion: of time, attention, authority, and professional identity. In a culture that treats knowledge as scarce and legitimacy as something earned through sustained exclusivity, movement between fields is easily interpreted as a lack of commitment to any single one.

Modern academic and artistic institutions reinforce this anxiety by rewarding forms of depth that are easily legible and quantifiable. Narrow specialization within clearly demarcated areas of practice (acting, directing, technical work, or scenic, lighting, sound, property and costume design) carries recognizable lineages that make one’s value visible and defensible within systems that depend on categorization and quantifiable assessment. For the specialist, commitment to a single discipline is not merely methodological; it’s existential. Authority, identity, and self-worth become tethered to the belief that total investment of time, energy, and attention is the precondition for seriousness and legitimacy.

Generalism, by contrast, resists easy accounting. Its insights tend to be relational and synthetic, often emerging slowly and across contexts rather than announcing themselves within a single, clearly defined disciplinary boundary.

Rethinking Knowledge in Theatre

Theatre does not present a closed body of knowledge waiting to be mastered. It is an unstable convergence of texts, bodies, histories, technologies, spaces, and audiences, all of which are in constant flux. To claim the possibility of mastery over such a practice is less a description of understanding than an assertion of authority.

Artistic comprehension does not advance through enclosure, but through exposure: through encounter with contradiction, difference, and friction. Theatre knowledge is not cumulative in the way mastery implies. One does not complete an understanding of acting, directing, or design. One continually re-encounters them under new conditions. Furthermore, repeated practice without critical reflection consolidates habit rather than understanding. Familiarity is reinforced without deepening insight.

Maybe a more accurate framework for the advanced study and practice of theatre would abandon mastery in favor of orientation. Rather than promising command over a bounded field, training could cultivate the capacity to navigate complexity, interpret shifting conditions, and situate one’s work within broader aesthetic, historical, and conceptual systems.

Maybe rigor and legitimacy don’t have to lie in claims of control, but in sustained responsiveness and reflection. Advancement does not signal completion, but an expanded responsibility to think relationally and remain open to revision.

Afterall, if one claims to truly love theatre, on what grounds could they justify engaging with only a fraction of its practices, histories, and forms?