A Third Space

In this big, lonely city, it can feel like forces beyond our control are pulling us apart. As communal spaces disappear from the city, the idea of a cozy, inviting place that fosters genuine connections becomes more precious.

Abe Koogler’s Staff Meal is about an alluring restaurant and the social ecosystem it sustains: the veteran servers, the new waiter, the benevolent chef, the enigmatic owner, and the grateful people who patronize it. And Staff Meal is about us, the discerning audience, who might question the restaurant’s unfamiliar nature – and also might be transformed by it.

The restaurant is built on two radical values of care: “Acts of Service” and “Flights of Fancy.” An Act of Service is an expression of that care, a gift that increases the love between two people. A Flight of Fancy is a pause to smell the roses, an exquisite tangent.

Staff Meal thrives in its tangents. Much like a Flight of Fancy, the play’s winding structure is subversive in how it rejects efficiency and linear progress. Instead, characters dawdle, meander, indulge, philosophize, and take us on a surprising metatheatrical journey. Metatheatricality involves showing the strings of how a play is made; it can emotionally estrange audiences, thus compelling them to think more critically about the play’s content. Staff Meal works toward a similar aim, but doesn’t emotionally estrange; rather, it approaches emotions from an oblique angle – through unexpected turns of phrase, odd power dynamics, or circuitous paths of logic – causing us to feel deeply, but in a way that is also destabilizing.

Embedded in Staff Meal is a critique of housing insecurity, social isolation, artificial scarcity, profit motives, privatization, and a host of other phenomena which keep the rich rich and the poor poor. Rather than tell us how to think about these issues, the play operates like a Rorschach test; the storytelling’s associative structure stimulates the subconscious, allowing us to latch onto the ideas that are most resonant. From this place of activation and personal passion, we can deconstruct toxic value systems – and maybe even rebuild them.

So how can we replace profit with care? What are the spaces that we hope to build? The restaurant presents one answer: a warm community space, where strangers can exercise an untapped empathy.

In The Great Good Place, urban sociologist Ray Oldenburg writes about the necessity of this community space. He calls it the “third space,” a location separate from home (the first space) and work (the second space) with leisure as its primary activity. A “third space” could be a bar, café, stoop, rec center, salon, or any other hub bursting with conversation between regulars who grant the space its unique character. Oldenburg writes, “[Third spaces] are the heart of a community's social vitality, the grassroots of democracy, but sadly, they constitute a diminishing aspect of the American social landscape."

There is a pervasive fear that these places will turn to dust and the ecosystems surrounding them will disappear. Because, unfortunately,“third spaces” aren’t necessarily economically viable. 

But unlike money, community is inherently valuable. We sometimes lose sight of this when we get lost in our big, lonely city – until we find ourselves a third space, and trade stories in its warm, welcoming cocoon.