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Stage Management: Plays & Musicals / POLICIES: Responsibility breakdown

« on: Feb 18, 2012, 06:27 pm »

I am just about to close my first show as a solo SM, and the biggest headache for me throughout the process has been figuring out who is responsible for which aspects of the show.  This is community theatre so things aren't as organized as they could be.  I don't like to work like that.  I believe in having a clear understanding of what my job entails, and what my duties and expectations are.  To that end, before starting the show I laid out my expectations of what my responsibilities for the production would entail.  The contract I signed covered most of these things, and the things which weren't explicitly covered were easily agreed to since I was asking to do more than they expected.  The problem I ran into during the production was that while I had a clear understanding of my responsibilities, I realized that I had never received a clear breakdown of other peoples responsibilities.  I had certain preconceived notions of what I expected different staff positions to do, and while overall they were close, there were some significant differences which I was only finding out about as issues came up.  Obviously I now know better than to expect every theatre company to have the same titles mean the same responsibilities especially when in community theatre companies may merge positions etc.  Moving forward I would like to avoid having this happen.  I suspect things are different for Equity SMs vs. community theatre, but I would value any input from anyone as to how you typically deal with this sort of situation. 

At the post show feedback session, I plan on bringing this up as a problem I had.  I would like to propose that there be a handbook for all of the staff positions which explains what the responsibilities are.  It may be a bit of work, but I feel it would be beneficial.  What are your thoughts on this?