How to Set up a Stage

Our sets tend to be simple. Here is our set from "The Winter's Tale." We made two columns from cardboard cement forms (sold at hardware stores). Here Hermione poses as a statue. In other scenes a chair was placed between the columns to make a throne room.

One year a very creative student came up with the idea of making a tree out of cardboard and foam. An enterprising father mounted the tree on a frame. The tree was the key set piece to suggest a forest.

We often cover benches or chairs with fabric to create court furnishings.

Another year we made trees out of strips of fabric hung from the grid above the stage. You can see the trees in the background of this picture.

This Merchant of Venice set was perhaps our most ambitious. The arches were made of foam and painted by one of our talented students to give texture and dimension. We changed the lighting to differentiate between Venice and Belmont. In addition we created the busy streets of Venice by having actors who populated the background as merchants, townspeople and urchins. They were our “living scenery” and they enjoyed the creativity of planning how they would interact and move around the stage.

Our scripts take just under two hours to perform. To keep the pace lively, we cue our actors to enter while the actors from the previous scene are departing the stage. We usually need a blackout only once or twice during a play. When possible we have used actors to carry their own props and set pieces on and off the stage to save having a blackout while the set crew placed these items. Often this can be done in a way that is consistent with the story. In this scene, for example, the "rustics" carried in their own table.