By Kayla Martinez
Entertainment Editor
My first Stage Management position was during In the Heights. From all that I learned, I’ll try my best to meld it all into a concise article, as much as a keyboard allows me to.
Aside from the presumptions of several interested audiences members, I did not direct this production. That would be far too much credit for me to take.
A Stage Manager, to put things plainly, runs a show after the artistic director has done his or her part. The Stage Manager stays throughout the duration of a production’s rehearsal process to study the movement and feel of it, working between the director and the cast to develop a solid list for the elements outside the acting, that make a show complete. This includes Sound and Light Cues, blackouts, transitions and curtain calls. Because the Stage Manager is the only one who knows specifically what the director’s vision translates to, his or her word goes to keep performances moving once the show gets there, and the artistic director is done.
Throughout the rehearsal process, I was talking to some of my cast members about who actually has more responsibility in a show. We came out with the result being that actors and Stage Managers have equal parts responsibility, and equal amounts of stress.
The actor memorizes the lines of the production, the choreography, the music, their character development, working endlessly to perfect a single character. The Stage Manager looks on the show as a whole, and from the beginning is the mouthpiece for the cast to the director, and vice versa. The actor has the stress at the beginning, the stage manager has the stress at the end.
Having done both, I’ve come to my personal conclusion that acting is actually more stress. My job as Stage Manager was to view the show wholly, and objectively, without going too in depth about any one element because I had to be aware of everything going on.
As an actor, I’ve had to go so deep in research, just to be sure I was doing the job right. Regardless of everything else going on, it was my face being analyzed above all else. It is the actors that the audience sees, or is aware that they see.
If nothing else, I definitely have a stronger appreciation for the technical side of theatre. I was blessed with, at least, a first production that matched my amount of experience on the technical side of things. I have been a technician before, I know the concepts of lights and sound and what makes a show hit home. I know how to accentuate actors, but I needed to DO what I said I KNEW.
In the Heights was good for that, I feel, because it wasn’t too complex, but I endured enough stress to teach me that the position I had was not easy. I was ranking, and with that came too much responsibility to be slacking throughout the process.
However, in the midst of all this, I must also say I have a stronger appreciation for the process actors go through in the length of a show. As a technician in Starstruck Theatre’s Seussical, in January of 2015, I was not there throughout the long rehearsal months to see the actors, MY actors now, as I would call my In the Heights cast, grow. I grew close to the cast as a whole, not to a few, as I would if I were an actor myself in the production. I grew close, rather, to the movement of the show, its progression, and I felt so much more that I belonged to it, because I was a huge part of what helped it grow.
As a lower technician I realize the process can feel like you’re just attached to a production for a few days to a few weeks, not understanding what’s going on unless you’ve seen it before or you’re very familiar with it. I felt that I was slung on to Seussical and, while I enjoyed it, I couldn’t feel that I was part of the family that had formed because I had not grown with everyone else in the preceding months of preparation they’d had.
This felt different. Closer.
Now, between Stage Management and acting, I’ll almost always choose acting. My place is onstage, the face before the audience where my craft is projected to stimulate the emotions of an audience.
But I do believe every actor needs to be a technician once. It’s a sacrifice, in a way, but sacrifice leads to appreciation. I was not an audience member or an actor, but I still had a creation to watch unfold.
