Introduction!

[smkitten]

Hello Stage Manager friends!

I'm a senior theater major at a small liberal arts college in Ohio. I've done a ton of stage managing (and other technical theater things) during my time in college. I've worked on a couple of summerstock festivals, a show at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, and a couple of little shows in Cleveland. I also spent a semester studying Stage Management abroad at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, which was amazing. I'm a long-time lurker who finally decided to crawl out of the woodwork as an internship application procrastination method.

One of my favorite SM stories is from a production of The Little Prince a couple of summers ago. It was an hour and a half long with no intermission, and the Aviator was played by a fifties-ish man who didn't get to leave the stage during the performance. I was on deck, but there were no scenic changes/prop handoffs/etc, so my job was basically just to be there in case of emergency.
One afternoon a couple of weeks into the run, about an hour and fifteen minutes into the show, the SM commented that the Aviator was sitting down at an usual time - he wasn't blocked to sit, and it didn't make much sense. We were a little bit confused, but there wasn't much that we could do. About ten minutes later, we reached the scene where the Little Prince dies. It was a really beautiful scene where the Aviator stood to the side and watched as a puppet-Prince was bitten by a puppet-snake. However, during this particular performance, the Aviator powerwalked off of the stage when he would normally be watching the death scene. Much to my surprise, he dashed past me into the paint shop, where he proceeded to pee into the paint sink. He then returned to the stage to give his closing monologue.
This actor also happens to be a professor at my school, so luckily it's become a running joke between me and him. The moral of the story? Never let an actor drink a large iced coffee before a show where he cannot leave the stage.

Also, my favorite not-really-a-tip tip is to keep a quote book. Theater people say the funniest things. (Obviously, use your discretion about sharing it with others.)

[PSMKay]

Hello Kitten. Thanks for joining us! Sounds like you've been busy making the most of your college experiences, so props to you for that. You're entitled to a little procrastination. Hopefully some of our pros have given you pause to think twice about jumping too heavily into the internship hamster wheel.

Keeping a record of funny quotes is something I used to do - just don't get carried away and start including them in the notes. People usually don't like being taken out of context in any situation, especially if it's going on the record.

I never got to do a study abroad term. What was your daily life like over in Scotland?

[smkitten]

Oh the internship hamster wheel. Ideally, I'll do one year-long internship somewhere and then progress into the real world. But that's obviously easier said than done. I am open to moving almost anywhere right now, and I am exceptionally skilled at living off of beans and rice and coffee, so hopefully everything will work out.

My time in Scotland was really great. At some point, I'm going to write up a big long post about it and add it to one of the study abroad threads for other SM students. On a day-to-day basis, we were mostly working on shows. I ASMed two shows while I was there. (Technically I actually SMed one, as the SM got sick right before tech and I suddenly had to figure out how to run a UK tech rehearsal all by myself. But that's a story for another time.). We had to be in 9-6 Tuesday-Friday, and we could also be called in the evenings or on Saturdays at the SM's discretion. SM teams are set up differently in the UK, so I spent most of my time building/sourcing props and doing paperwork, with the occasional rehearsal. On Mondays, we went to classes and couldn't be called for show work. I took the second-year Production Technology and Management class with all of the second-year stage managers/lighting & sound designers/electricians/technical directors - since there are only about 20 students per year on the PTM course, everyone follows a prescribed schedule. Our class covered everything from Production Management to Health and Safety to Pyro. I also did an Independent Study where I learned to play the Highland pipes and wrote a paper on Scottish traditional music and dance.

It was the first year that RCS opened up the application to all US universities instead of just CalArts, so I was essentially their liberal arts guinea pig. The language barrier was pretty difficult for me for a while - the accents and daily vocabulary were fine, but theater terminology is completely different. I didn't process until last year just how many acronyms we use in theater... it's not a huge leap to figure out that technical stage manager = technical director or production electrician = master electrician, but things get confusing quickly when everyone's referring to the TSM and PLX and you don't know that they mean the TD and ME! But it was a good experience overall, and it was great to spend so much time with other people who love theater as much as I do.

[Maribeth]

Hi and welcome! Thanks for sharing your experience- definitely would like to see a thread with more info about your time abroad. And very cool that you learned to play the pipes!