DEFINING A STAGE MANAGERS DUTIES

Being a stage manager—whether taping a floor, running a rehearsal room, calling a show, working the deck—is a position for highly-skilled, highly-trained workers. Most actors have little sense of the scope of the work that our SM siblings do, and I'll admit to having been far too ignorant of it before getting involved in Equity governance.

But while we should all have an incredible amount of respect for the work that an SM does, Equity's contracts are largely silent on what the duties of a stage manager actually are. When defining what is—and isn't—an actor's job, there's rarely any controversy. And yet, without a proper contractual definition of what an employer should reasonably expect from the SMs that they hire, we run into some problems.

First, without a definition, our employers often ask our SMs on contract do