Marybeth Abel - Stage Manager
What Exactly Is A Stage Manager?
“As a stage manager, your job is to carry out the artistic integrity of the show. During rehearsals, you're the liaison between the director and the designers. You're basically a problem solver...
One of the things that I do, which isn't written in any book like 'How to Stage Manage,' but I always like to take a new actor, down to the most incidental character, out for coffee, and we spend two or three hours discussing the show, and discussing each scene, because the ensemble is in almost every scene, so they need to know the time period, they need to know what's happening during that time, why are people in rags, why are people disabled. We also have a really wonderful resource in that we have the novel, so I always pull sections out of the book, and give the actors character background.
I always say that 90% of my job is psychotherapy. You have to be very judicious and know how to balance things and try not to make this person unhappy while making this person happy. It's a lot of psychology and I never took a psychology class in my life!
We sit at a console, and we've got a monitor of the conductor, and we've got a monitor of the stage. You call 'places,' and you make sure everybody's where they're supposed to be, you check with the crew, you check with the sound people, you check with the conductor. It's amazing when you sit down and think, 'I've got this thing under control.' At eight o'clock you call 'places,' and you've got 250 people all kicking in and doing the same thing to entertain the audience.
It's always new, every night there's something new... but once eight o'clock hits, once the show goes up, everything just kicks into gear and everybody relaxes...”
What Was The Most Exciting Thing That Ever Happened During A Show?
“The crew went to do the pre-set (the daily check of all equipment): the barricades run on hydraulics, so they have to charge the fluid that drives them on and off the stage. So when they went to charge the stage right barricade, it wasn't holding any pressure, they couldn't get it to run. The head carpenter came to me and said, I don't think we can use the stage right barricade. So in a matter of 25 minutes, we restaged the entire barricade scene with just one barricade. We had a group in the theatre who had seen the show before, who didn't realize that we had made the change. So there we accomplished our goal, to make it seamless, despite the problem.
That's why I love doing what I do. It's great when everything runs smoothly, it's what you want to have happen. But it's amazing what happens when you have a problem like that and everyone kicks in together - it's why I do theatre, I think, because of that feeling of family and collaboration...”
