Stagecraft

• 1. Introduction

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  Stagecraft is the technical side of theatrical, film, and video production, the practical work that turns a designer's vision into something an audience can see and hear. It covers a sprawling list of crafts: constructing and rigging scenery, hanging and focusing lighting, making and sourcing costumes, applying make-up, managing the stage, engineering audio, and finding props. None of that is the script, the acting, or the direction. It is everything that surrounds them and makes them possible.

  The field is usually called technical rather than artistic. Its job is to implement a scenic designer's artistic vision, not to invent one. That distinction matters, and it sets stagecraft apart from the wider umbrella term of scenography. So who actually does this work, and how did a single person juggling scenery and sound grow into the dozens of specialists behind a modern show? And how far back does the machinery of theatre really go? The answers run from ancient Greece to the electric stage.

• 2. From One Hand To Many

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  In its most basic form, stagecraft can be carried out by a single person. On a smaller production that person is often the stage manager, who arranges all the scenery, costumes, lighting, and sound while also organizing the cast. One pair of hands holds the entire technical side of the show together.

  Regional theaters and larger community theaters work differently. They generally employ a technical director along with a full complement of designers, and each designer has a direct hand in their own area of design. The labor splits apart as the production grows.

  A modern Broadway show sits at the far end of that scale. Bringing such a show to opening night calls for skilled carpenters, painters, electricians, stagehands, stitchers, and wigmakers, among others. Modern stagecraft is highly technical and specialized. It contains many sub-disciplines and carries a vast trove of history and tradition behind every opening night.

• 3. The Greek Machine

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  Greek theatre made extensive use of stagecraft, and its vocabulary and practice still shape Western stagecraft today. The defining element of a Greek stage was the skene, a structure standing at the back, often built with three doors. The usual setting for a classical Greek tragedy was a palace, so skenes were decorated to support that setting.

  On the audience side of the skene hung what we now call flats. These evolved from one-sided to two-sided painted flats, mounted and centered on a rotating pin. Rope ran around each consecutive pin so the flats could be turned for scene changes, and the double-sided flat eventually became the periaktos.

  The ekkyklema, much like a contemporary wagon, let a company show the death of a character by rolling out the dead body rather than staging the death onstage. The mechane, a crane for lifting actors over the skene, supported the endings of plays, whose plots were often resolved suddenly by a god appearing. That crane is the literal source of the phrase deus ex machina. Performances were lit by sunlight, and companies often used the particular time of day to support the story.

• 4. Streets, Globes, And Picture Boxes

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  Medieval plays were staged in many places, including the streets of towns and cities, performed by traveling secular troupes. Others were held in monasteries by church-controlled groups, often portraying religious scenes. A playing place could stand for indoors or outdoors, as in the Cornish plen-an-gwary amphitheatres, and locations were chosen so the right props could be used. Songs and spectacles often enhanced participation.

  More modern stagecraft developed in England between 1576 and 1642. London had three kinds of theaters: public, private, and court. Sizes and shapes varied, though many are thought to have been round. Public playhouses such as the Globe Theatre used rigging housed in a room on the roof to raise and lower scenery or actors, and they built trap-doors into the raised stage. Most theaters were circular, with an open area above the pit so sunlight could reach the stage.

  Proscenium stages, also called picture-box stages, were built in France around the time of the English Restoration. They remain the most popular form of stage in use, and they originally borrowed from the skene, essentially building one onstage. Lighting of that period meant candles, set as foot-lights and hung from chandeliers above the stage.

• 5. Limelight And Gas Flames

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  The Victorian era in England pushed stagecraft forward fast as the West End emerged. An influx of urbanites into greater London pressed Parliament to drop earlier licensing laws, and in 1843 all theaters were permitted to perform straight plays. Electric lighting and hydraulics drew large crowds to watch on-stage storms, explosions, and miraculous transformations. Technologies from the latter part of the 19th century opened the way for special effects in film.

  Lighting kept evolving through some unlikely inventions. In England a lamp using a blowpipe to heat lime to incandescence was developed for navigation, then adapted to the theatre, and limelight became a widespread artificial light. A Fresnel lens was used to control the focus of the beam.

  After candles came gas lighting, fed through pipes with small openings lit before every performance and dimmed by controlling the gas flow, provided the flame never went out. At the turn of the 20th century, many companies switching from gas to electricity installed the new system right beside the old one. The electricity ignited the gas lines, causing many explosions and fires. Modern theatrical lighting is electrically based, with many lamps and instruments in use, in a field rapidly becoming one of the most diverse and complex in the industry.

• 6. The Modern Trades

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  Lighting design opens the list of modern sub-disciplines. It determines the angle, size, intensity, shape, and color of light for a scene, and it covers hanging, focusing, procurement, and maintenance of lighting and special-effects equipment, plus aspects of show control. Make-up and wigs are applied to accentuate an actor's features. Mechanics covers the design, engineering, and operation of flown scenery, the flying of performers, and mechanized scenic elements and effects.

  Production gathers stage management, production management, show control, house management, and company management. Scenery includes set design, set construction, scenic painting, theater drapes and stage curtains, and special effects. Sound design ranges from musical underscoring to vocal and instrument mixing and theatrical sound effects, and the sound designer also handles system design and build.

  Theatrical property, or props, takes in furnishings, set dressings, and every item too large or small to count as scenery, electrics, or wardrobe. Props an actor handles are hand props, and those kept in a costume are personal props. Wardrobe covers costume design, construction, procurement, and maintenance. Video, or projection, is a relatively recent field gaining recognition, and its role may also fall to the lighting or scenery disciplines. Stage automation controls moving electronics that shift set pieces, set dressings, and even the stage floor, and it can include rigging whenever a motor drives the lines or objects.