Written by Brielle Jobe

Since I began my theatre career in 2009, I have been a part of over 50 projects in a variety of positions including actor, playwright, director, electrician, choreographer, and stage manager. And every time, come hell or high water, that curtain rose and fell on a completed production with dozens of moving parts running like a well-oiled machine. Theatre practitioners know how to prioritize and organize. If something isn’t working and can’t be fixed, it gets scrapped. That being said, if the thing that isn’t working is you have an actor who’s too short to reach a set piece, the director knows (and accepts) that they can’t make an actor taller, so the set piece is the thing that meets the ax. This ability to sacrifice and compromise is one of many that enables a theatre to work properly and get things done. And the thing is, no one’s feelings get hurt!

Theatre practitioners are master collaborators. Your average theatre production has a core technical team of a director, a stage manager, 5–8 designers and their respective crews, and a cast of anywhere between 1 and 100. That’s a pretty large team to all be working towards the same goal when failure is not an option. While they definitely have their fair share of disagreements, at the end of the day, they produce one cohesive collaboration.

Here’s how they do it:

You start with the core creatives — the director (the idea guy), the stage manager (the foreman), and the designers (the specialists). The stage manager takes the brunt of organizational responsibilities, freeing up the rest to create unencumbered by logistical tasks. The director is the lead visionary but they don’t always have the final say. Their job is to be the lightning rod of creativity (as coined by Anne Bogart in her book A Director Prepares). What does this mean? The director has the original idea or vision of what they want to convey — the abstract. And they want to corral the designers in the correct direction but trust that they’ll create the desired effect without hand-holding or micro-managing. The director shouldn’t say they want the lights to be blue and purple, they should instead say, they want an effect of cold magic and trust their lighting designer will deliver. The director should be able to express their intentions without boxing in their designers.

Once the intention of a piece has been established in this closed meeting of our core, the respective designers return to their crews. The ideas are then reviewed by the experts — electricians discuss the effect of the lights, engineers discuss that of the sound, carpenters of the set, etc. Then they get to work.

In a set timeframe, the core returns to share their respective progress for review. Additionally in this phase, everything is cross-referenced with each other. If a set designer wants an outcropping but there’s no lighting rig to accommodate the angles and keep actors lit, now you have a problem. The respective specialists are consulted to try to find a solution. If the ideas are agreed upon and problems addressed, the work continues.

The final phase is connecting everything all at once, getting everyone in the same room. In the theatre, this usually happens at tech week — a crash course of 5–7 days where all technical elements meet human elements in order to form that cohesive product.

It’s important to note that at each of these phases, everyone’s opinion is valued, but the experts in each field hold the final say. And there is a certain way to express those opinions without disrupting the peace…

If you’ve ever been in a Beginning Acting class, you’ve probably heard the phrase, “I just felt that…” This is a strategy employed in order to take the criticism onto the commenter and take the judgement off the receiver. “I felt that you weren’t being sincere,” sounds a lot better than “That sucked!” By expressing criticism through how it made me, the critic, feel, the possibility remains that the actor in question has done nothing wrong, just that for some reason, it’s not reading — and in the theatre, that perception from the outside, is really all that matters. As creatives, we have to cast aside our egos because we can build what we believe to be the most glorious masterpiece that invokes all the emotions we intended and none of the ones we didn’t, but…if the audience doesn’t feel that way, it’s a waste. Theatre is a product that depends entirely on third party reception. And that perception could have nothing to do with you or your skills. It could be a matter of context, a matter of placement, a matter of mood of the audience that day. There are countless external variables, so theatre practitioners have had to become experts on internal variables to minimize error and maximize success.

For these reasons, theatre kids are exactly who you want your executives to know — because we get stuff done and we don’t get mad about it. We’re trained from the beginning to collaborate and rely on others. No one is more or less important because, yes it’s true that you can’t have a play without actors, but you also can’t have a play in the dark, or naked, or sing to silence, or perform in the streets. You need one another and they need you. In the theatre you have to be able to take criticism and respond to it effectively. And if you’re in charge, you have to be able to give criticism effectively, too. You all have to work together and work through countless versions and perspectives. If you get sour every time someone poo-poos an idea, you’re never going to get your act together in time.

Theatre practitioners, despite our reputation, have to be reliable, resourceful, cooperative, open-minded, humble, and, of course, creative. Some of those buzzwords sound familiar?