“Everybody likes a lady who has a lot of good ideas but doesn’t need to be in charge,” is how Victoria Rayburn (not her real name), a Washington, D.C., stage manager, put it. She even noted how her socialization as a woman has contributed to her success as a stage manager. “As a woman, personality management is built in—‘Like, oh my gosh, a man with an ego?!,’” she joked. “That’s absolutely part of everyday life, in all aspects of my life. It’s not just that I learned that at work; I learned that in my house with my brother!”
Lisa Smith also described her style as motherly, explaining that rather than using conflict or confrontation as strategies for getting people to do what she wants, she leverages “guilt and disappointment.” She never yells at people if they’re late; instead, she expresses concern and asks what she can do to help next time.
While this may be a successful approach to working with actors, Smith said she has encountered blatant hostility from backstage workers simply for being a woman in charge. On one show, she recalled, an all-female stage management team encountered a troubling degree of resistance from the all-male union backstage crew. Of one man in particular, she said, “I would speak to him and he would talk to someone else to tell me something—truly, a grown-ass man in his 60s who wouldn’t regard me as a human being.”
She laughed as she related this story, but noted more somberly that she regrets not reporting the behavior. (Both of her fellow stage managers did.)
Stage Management as an Art
But stage managers are not simply glorified babysitters or under- compensated human resources professionals. Most enter and remain in the field because of their affinity for the work onstage. As Smith put it, stage managers now “are not just a stopwatch.” As technology and culture have shifted over the past 30 years, “what a stage manager has to do has become more graceful. It is an art to do it well.” Said Rebecca Skupin, a stage manager in Houston, “I definitely consider myself an artist.”
Certainly stage managers need to understand basic dramaturgy, lighting, and theatrical timing to rehearse and call shows, but seldom are their artistic abilities recognized publicly. This may be changing: In 2021, Minneapolis-based Elizabeth MacNally won a prestigious McKnight Foundation Artist Fellowship for her work as a stage manager—the first time the organization has recognized stage management as an artistic practice in its own right.
MacNally worked frequently with the late director Marion McClinton at Pillsbury House Theatre in Minneapolis. By her account, McClinton’s approach to directing was to get out of the way of the story, and MacNally said she similarly sees herself “as a stage manager of the story. Are we getting in the way of the story? And if we are, how do we get ourselves out of that and get back to the story? The last thing we want to have happen is the audience gets smarter than us.”
Rosey Lowe, who had been working in Minneapolis and Chicago when we spoke, came to stage management from an acting background. They joked that rather than run a tight ship as a stage manager, they prefer to run rehearsals like a “very functional loose canoe.” The artistic process needs flexibility, she explained, because “you sometimes can’t plan for when a breakthrough is going to happen.”
Out of the Shadows
Still, aesthetic or otherwise, much stage management labor goes unrecognized.
“I am perfectly happy working in the shadows,” said Lyndsey Goode of Arlington, Texas, “except to the extent that networking is how you get your next gig.” Rayburn concurred on the double-edged sword of invisibility, saying, “If you are in theatre and you don’t know what a stage manager does, or at least what your stage manager does, you’re not appreciating the people you work with.”
Invisibility can also translate to monetary devaluation. As Goode pointed out, “A stage manager is never going to sell a ticket,” and on Broadway name recognition comes with more power to negotiate a contract. Ultimately, she said, any producer can decide “if you’re not going to take it for minimum, they can find somebody else who will.”
This may be why, partly enabled by Zoom communication, some stage managers have spent the past four years building collective knowledge and power. New York-based stage manager Amanda Spooner started the Year of the Stage Manager project in 2020, and the connections continue via a Facebook group.
Meanwhile there has been material progress: Houston’s Skupin, elected as one of Equity’s Western Region Stage Manager Councilors in 2022, sounded hopeful when we spoke in 2023, noting that contract negotiations included a number of gains for stage managers, including more ASM contracts, reduced workweeks and increased rest hours, and better overtime policies. Additionally, according to a request for proposal from 2023, the union is also taking steps toward a name change “inclusive of all its members.”
From their unique position as conduits, funnels, or hubs, stage managers naturally accrue responsibilities and knowledge. They are therefore ideally positioned to advocate for the culture of rehearsals to change.
In the meantime, they must also advocate for themselves. Goode left for the Dallas-Fort Worth area when gigs in New York dried up during the pandemic, eventually landing a job as a company manager for a ballet company in Dallas, a position in which she utilizes stage management skills and continues to work in the arts. MacNally left Pillsbury House Theatre for a position as the associate director of event production at the Walker Art Center, also in Minneapolis.
For her part, Smith is still on the fence about how much of her professional life she wants to devote to the theatre. She has stage-managed one show a year since we spoke in 2022, and is trying to strike a balance between work that simply pays the bills and work fueled by passion and creativity. She said she is working with a career counselor to help her sort through these decisions and launch her into her next chapter.
Whichever path she chooses, it will be her own.
“I can’t fix this industry,” she said. “There’s not time in my lifetime to make this better.”
Angie Ahlgren (she/her) is a writer based in Duluth, Minn., and owner of Ahlgren Consulting, LLC, a consulting and coaching business for academics in the arts. Research for this article was supported by a faculty fellowship with the Institute for the Study of Culture and Society at Bowling Green State University, and a short-term fellowship from the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.
