Nobody knows what a stage manager does. I include in "nobody" a fair number of actors, most of my relatives, and the man who did my taxes, who wrote down "theater usher." When people find out I work in the theater they ask if I act. No. They ask if I direct. No. They ask what's left. This page is what's left.

I have been a stage manager since 1984, the last nine years as production stage manager at a mid-sized regional theater I'll call the Rep, with earlier stops at a summer playhouse on a lake and a very small company in a former church that I loved and that no longer exists. Roughly seventy productions. Musicals, Shakespeare, new plays, one opera I would rather not discuss. This page is for the students who write and ask how you get into this, and for anyone who ever sat in an audience and wondered who decided the lights would go down at exactly that moment. That was me. It's always somebody like me.

The director decides what the show is. The designers decide what it looks and sounds like. The actors do it. The stage manager is the person who makes sure all of that happens in the same room at the same time, on schedule, every night, exactly the same way, after the director has gone home. During rehearsals I run the room: I schedule, I take down every move the actors make, I keep the script current, I tell the designers what changed, I tell the actors when to be where. During performances I sit at a desk in the dark with a headset and the prompt book and I call every lighting change, every sound cue, every scene shift and every fly cue, by saying "go" at the right moment, several hundred times a night. If the leading lady is sick, I decide when to call the understudy. If the fire alarm goes off, I decide whether we stop. If the play runs a minute long on Tuesday I want to know why. The director gets the reviews. I get the show.

The prompt book is the show. If the theater burned down tonight and the book survived, you could rebuild the production. If the book burned and the theater survived, you could not.

It is a three-ring binder. In it, each page of the script is taped or copied onto the left-hand side of a larger sheet, with wide margins and a blank facing page. Into those margins and facing pages goes everything:

• Blocking. Every entrance, exit, cross, sit, stand and hand-off, for every actor, in pencil, keyed by number to the line it happens on. See the next section.
• Cues. Every lighting cue (LX), sound cue (SQ), fly cue, deck cue and special effect, written in the margin at the exact word or action it goes on, in a color that isn't pencil. Mine are red for lights, blue for sound, green for everything else. Some people use tape flags. I use tape flags too. There is no such thing as too findable.
• The calling script. Once cues are set, I write out, in the margin, exactly what I will say: "STANDBY LX 47, SQ 12" a page before, and "LX 47 GO" on the word. It sounds like overkill. It is why I don't have to think during the show, and not thinking is the goal.
• Props presets, scene shift plots, quick-change plots, the run sheets for every crew position, the contact sheet, the emergency procedures, the rehearsal reports. All in tabs at the back.

The book gets updated every night after rehearsal and every time anything changes. It is never, ever taken out of the building by anyone but me, and there's a photocopy of the current version in a drawer in the production office in case I get hit by a bus. Every stage manager I know has a bus plan. We're a cheerful profession.

Blocking is where the actors go. Writing it down fast enough to keep up with a rehearsal, legibly enough to read it back six weeks later, is the first skill of the job. Everyone has their own shorthand; mine is a mongrel, but the bones are standard:

So a facing-page entry reads something like: ① HR X DL to chair, sits. ② JB ENT UR w/ tray, X to table. Pencil, always pencil, because it will change tomorrow, and the day after, and at the dress rehearsal, and once, memorably, during intermission on opening night.

During the show I'm on a headset with the light board operator, the sound operator, the fly rail, and the deck crew heads. Every change they make, they make because I told them to, in a fixed form of words that has not changed in the fifty years anybody's been doing it this way:

"Warning LX 47." About a page out. Means: it's coming, get ready. (Some stage managers skip the warning and only give standbys. I give both on a complicated show and only standbys on a simple one.)

"Standby LX 47." About fifteen to thirty seconds out. The operator answers "Standing by." If they don't answer, I don't go. If two cues are close together I stand them by together: "Standby LX 47 and SQ 12."

"LX 47... GO." The cue happens on the word "go," and nothing happens before it. Ever. You say the cue number first, then a breath, then "go," so the operator has their hand on the button before they hear the word. You never, ever say the word "go" on headset in any other context. You do not say "let's go get coffee" at intermission on the headset. A light board op hears "go," they push the button.

That's it. Warning, standby, go. The art is in the timing: whether the lights start to fade on the last word of the line or a half-second after, whether the sound cue starts under the door slam or on it. A director will spend twenty minutes in tech on the timing of one blackout, and it's my job to hit it that way every night for six weeks, in a room where the actors are a little faster on Fridays and a little slower on Sunday matinees. I count. I watch the actor's shoulders. I know where the breath is. Four thousand cues. Eleven misses, and I remember each one.

The other call I make, which the audience never hears, is "places." At five minutes to curtain, on the backstage monitor and in person: "Places, please, for the top of Act One. Places." And every actor answers "Thank you, places," because in this business you acknowledge every call, so I know you heard it and I don't have to go looking for you. Then I go to my desk, put on the headset, say "Standby house to half," and we start.

Before a show opens there are, at the Rep, about four weeks of rehearsal, six days a week, and then a week of tech and dress rehearsals in the theater with the real lights and set. The director runs the creative part. I run everything else, which is:

• The room. I'm there an hour before the actors, taping the floor (the set's floor plan, in colored tape, actual size, so they can learn where the walls will be), setting rehearsal furniture and props, making the coffee. The director walks in and the room is ready. That's the whole point of me.
• The schedule. Which scenes, which actors, what time, posted the day before, with breaks. The union sets the break rules and I hold to them to the minute: five minutes every fifty-five, or ten every eighty, and a meal break, and I'm the one who says "that's a break, please" even when the director is mid-sentence, because that's the job and the director knows it.
• The blocking. See above. Everything they do, written down, so when an actor says "did I cross on that line or the next one" three weeks later I can tell them, and I'm right.
• The rehearsal report. Every night, typed and in every department's box by morning: what we rehearsed, what changed, what the director wants from props, costumes, lights, sound, sets. "Director would like the letter to be in an envelope." "Please add a second chair to the Act 2 preset." "Actor needs the coat pocket to hold a pistol." Nobody in the building is surprised on tech day. That's the goal.
• Prompting. When they go off book and call "line," I give it, flat, no acting, just the words.
• Everything else. Someone's sick. Someone's late. The rehearsal piano is out of tune. The ceiling leaks. A stage manager's real job title is "the person you tell."

The Scottish Play. You do not say the name of Shakespeare's Scottish tragedy inside a theater. You say "the Scottish play," or "Mackers," or you point. If you slip and say it, the traditional cure is to leave the building, turn around three times, spit, swear, and knock to be let back in. Do I believe a name can curse a building? No. Do I make people do it? Every time. I once made a board member do it in the rain. Partly because it's tradition, partly because the play does have a lot of fights and fog and dim lighting and people do get hurt doing it, and partly because it's very good for a company to have one rule that everyone follows without arguing, and this is a harmless one.

"Break a leg." You never wish an actor good luck. You say break a leg. Nobody agrees on why. I've heard six explanations and I don't find any of them convincing, and it doesn't matter. Dancers say "merde." Opera singers say something in Italian. It all means: I know what you're about to do, and I'm on your side.

The ghost light. A single bare bulb on a stand, left burning center stage all night when the theater is empty. The romantic version is that it's for the theater's ghost, so it can perform when no one's around. The practical version is that a stage is a very dark room with a very sudden drop at the front of it, and the first person in the morning would like to not walk off the edge. Both true. I'm as sentimental about the ghost light as I am about anything. It's the last thing I do every night.

No whistling backstage. This one has a real reason: in the old days the fly system was run by sailors, on ropes, and they signaled each other by whistling. A stray whistle could drop a piece of scenery on your head. There are no sailors on my fly rail and the signals are on headset now, but I still don't allow it, because a rule that's kept people alive for two hundred years has earned its retirement with honors.

Peacock feathers, real flowers on stage, saying the last line at rehearsal, blue costumes. I've heard them all. I hold with none of them and I don't stop anyone who does. The theater runs on a certain amount of hocus-pocus and I'd rather it be on stage than in my prompt book.

1. Stage manage everything you can, now. The school play. The church pageant. Your cousin's band. There is no substitute for having been the person in charge of the room. A degree in it is nice; I have one; the degree did not teach me to call a show.
2. Be early. Not on time. Early. A stage manager who is on time is late. This is the entire job interview, and it lasts the rest of your life.
3. Write everything down. If it's not in the book, it didn't happen. Your memory is not a filing system, no matter how good it is at nineteen.
4. Learn to be calm on purpose. When something goes wrong on stage, everyone in the building will look at you. If you look calm, they stay calm. You are allowed to panic later, in the car.
5. It is not about you. You will never take a bow. The best review you will ever get is that nobody noticed anything. If you need applause, there's an audition down the hall.
6. Be kind to the crew and firm with the stars, not the other way around. The people who move the furniture are the ones who'll save you.
7. Get a good flashlight, a good pencil, a watch with a second hand, and comfortable black shoes. That's the kit. Everything else the theater provides.
8. Know that the money is bad and the hours are worse and that you'll be in a dark room on every Friday and Saturday night of your life. If that sounds fine to you, write me. If it sounds fine to you and you were already early, you're hired.

Every stage manager has one. This is mine. I'll leave out the name of the play; it's a well-known drawing-room piece from the twenties in which, in the third act, a character produces a letter that changes everything, reads it aloud, and the plot turns on it. The letter is a prop. It lives on a silver tray on a table upstage left, preset before Act Three, and the actor picks it up on a cue, opens it, and reads.

Second Saturday of the run, 1993, the summer playhouse. Two minutes into Act Three. I'm at the desk. I glance up at the monitor and I see the tray, and the tray is empty.

Here is what goes through a stage manager's head in the four seconds after that: Where is it. Who had it last. Can it be got. Can it be faked. Do we stop. In that order, and fast. I get on headset, very evenly: "ASM, the letter is not on the tray. Find it. You have six pages." My ASM that summer, a college kid named Dana who is now a much better stage manager than I am, says "Copy" and vanishes.

What had happened, we found out later, was this. The actor who reads the letter had, in Act One, worn a coat with a pocket. During the Act Two intermission, a well-meaning wardrobe volunteer had taken that coat back to the costume shop to press it for the next day. The letter, it turned out, had been in the coat pocket since the previous night's show, when the actor had absent-mindedly pocketed it during the curtain call instead of leaving it on the tray, and the ASM's preset check had found a letter on the tray, because there were two letters, the second being the backup, and the backup had been used on Friday, and now the backup was in the coat, and the coat was in the shop, and the shop was locked.

Four pages left. Dana on headset: "Shop's locked. Can't find the key." Me: "Then make one." Dana: "Make a KEY?" Me: "A LETTER."

Two pages left. Dana, breathing hard: "I have a letter." The letter was written, in ballpoint, on the back of a takeout menu from the sandwich place across the street, folded in thirds and shoved in an envelope from the box office. Dana walked it onto the set, in the dark, during a scene, in a black shirt, staying upstage of the actors, and put it on the tray, and walked off. Two hundred people watched a stagehand cross the stage in the middle of a play and, as far as I can tell, not one of them noticed, because the actors kept acting and nobody on stage looked at her, which is the whole trick.

The actor picked up the envelope on cue. Opened it. Looked at a takeout menu. And, God bless him, read the letter from memory, every word, in character, with the menu held up in front of him at exactly the right distance, and put it down, and the plot turned, and the play ended, and we took our bows, by which I mean they did.

Afterward I did three things. I hugged Dana, which I don't do. I bought the actor a drink, which I don't do. And I added a line to the Act Three preset check that is in every prompt book I have made since: "LETTER: on tray. Look at it. Open it. Confirm it is the letter." And the props list now says two letters, one on the tray and one in my pocket, every night, every show, whether the play has a letter in it or not.

It's on the run sheet at 7:15 above. The letter. That's why.