June 19, 2024
Stage management and the opposite of magic
This is adapted from a recent Facebook post.
This graphic was posted on the page of a Facebook group I follow a few weeks ago. It’s part of a whole genre of memes and rhetoric about the magic of the job that stage managers do. And I don’t want to be unkind about this, because I don’t believe the person who made this or the people sharing it meant to be unkind.
But actually… Kill the myth that stage managers are anything but your very human, equally fallible, hard-working collaborators.
We are not wizards. We are not time travelers. We do not have time-turners. We wish we did, but we don’t. We have the same number of hours in the day as the rest of you.
We are exhausted. We are struggling so much with work/life balance and quality of life. We are usually being under-resourced. We are so often being asked to function well outside the scope of our job. (And some of the things listed here are part of someone else’s job, or literally whole entire other jobs, which also deserve to have their existence and necessity respected.)
I don’t want to be called magic even one more time anywhere near as much as I want a stage management team appropriately staffed, compensated, and provided the resources we need for the scope of a project.
I don’t want to be called magic even one more time as much as I want to never again be asked to my face how much further stage management can be short-changed to fill a budget gap somewhere else.
I don’t want to be called magic as much as I want two days off in a week. As much as I want appropriate script support for first-time playwrights. As much as I never, ever, ever again want to see a fully-produced new musical rehearsed in two and a half weeks.
We aren’t flawless. We get to make mistakes, too. Rehearsal is for us, too. We do sweat. We do have feelings.
A lot of us are disabled! And I think these characterizations of stage managers as “magic” is functioning in largely the same way as when people call things like ADHD and autism “superpowers.” I get that it’s well-meant, but it actually makes it harder for other people to understand the work we’re doing and the kind of support we need. I think it leaves us feeling insufficient to the job when it doesn’t feel like magic, and blamed when we can’t make it look like magic, because, in fact, it isn’t.
I don’t want to be called magic again as much as I want to be seen as another human who is in the artistic process with you.
***
Some specific footnotes:
- Audio engineers and A2’s are whole entire jobs. That’s a whole other team of people making hard things look easy. Most stage managers do not have the kind of training or experience that being extremely good at them requires.
- It is still not taken for granted that the PSM still needs table space of our own during the designer run, and then, I promise you, these things are not happening flawlessly.
- We are being expected to use our own cell phones for giving calls and backstage communication a lot, especially for virtual work, but also just where Clear-Com systems are absent, insufficient, or outdated.
- There are a lot of things I can handle myself in a pinch; that is part of the job, but I do not take the place of having an electrician on call, or support for props and scenery repair and maintenance, for the length of the run.
- I don’t even quite know what to say about this one. Is this well-timed cups of coffee we drink ourselves, or well-timed cups of coffee we’re expected to provide to keep things running smoothly?
If the latter… that is not our job. And the expectation that it is detracts from our ability to do vastly more important parts of our job.
If daily team coffee is something a producer wants provided, then they need to have sufficiently staffed their company management, budgeted for hospitality, and hired PA’s.
I will gladly refresh a pot of coffee I find empty if I have time, or drink the last cup of, but this simply cannot be made my priority in rehearsal. - Yes, there is a huge extent to which demeanor and temperament and levelheadedness are important parts of the job. There’s also a point beyond which I have so often felt like I was the only person in the room being expected to keep it together.
- This one rankles especially. Because there are actually a lot of ways to be a good stage manager. There are a lot of personality types who can do the job well, but who will bring a different tenor to a room, and that’s okay. That’s good, actually. We don’t have to be able to be everything to everyone to succeed at this job. We don’t need to have this communication style to lead every team or every kind of project, or to fulfill our responsibility in helping maintain the morale and confidence of a cast.
Because of the proportion of women in this career field, and the level of emotional labor and sublimation already being expected of us. Because a lot of us are introverts, and we’re allowed to be, and there’s nothing wrong with that. It doesn’t mean that we can’t be caring and personable and expressive, but we might be those things in ways that read as less exuberant to some, and that has to be okay.
I think that there are people who look to a stage manager to reflect their own sense of urgency back to them, and that’s what tells them that their stage manager is taking a situation seriously. And there are people who look to a stage manager to not do that, to project a sense of calm and reassurance, and that’s what tells them that we have the situation under control (or we will), and everything’s going to be okay (eventually). One isn’t better than the other, but we may be better stage managers for different types of people, different directors, different productions.
Because as an autistic woman in this field, I am starting to suspect that my career trajectory has been deeply affected by how often my quieter modes of engagement have been mistaken for passivity.
Because if I were a college student discovering what I thought might be my calling for the first time, discovering again for the first time that a job existed at which I might not have to distort myself far beyond my capability in order to be accepted at, then I might have been dissuaded by yet another person telling me “no, actually, you’ll never be enough for this if this isn’t your natural mode of expression or interaction with other people.”
Chavisory's Notebook 