AMERICAN THEATRE: In November 2022, Lisa Smith was weighing whether to continue stage managing or to scale up her part-time job at a gardening center into a full-time gig. She’d been stage managing in the Twin Cities for 20 years, 15 of those as a member of Actors’ Equity Association (AEA), when the forced break of the pandemic reminded her what a full night’s sleep felt like. When theatres opened again and she returned to stage management, she grew wary of some companies’ plans for reopening and their failure to create contingency plans for any personnel but performers. Understudies are great—but what happens if the stage manager gets Covid and there is no backup?
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This article was immensely insightful in its discussion in the intricacies of the responsibilities of a stage manager, especially regarding ‘emotional labor’ and the finer details of interpersonal management that are involved in the role. From these discussions, I became interested in the question of whether the success of a stage manager or a manager in general is more dependent on their hard skills (i.e. explicit responsibilities of running a rehearsal room) or their soft skills (i.e. interpersonal management and conflict avoidance or resolution)? My initial thought is that they’re equally important, it is moreso that they are applied in different aspects of the work and as such success for a stage manager or manager in general is highly dependent on both aspects. From this, I also realized that the two in many regards are necessarily intertwined in that the approach one takes to completing work that is hard skill oriented is in fact influenced by soft skills in how one chooses to communicate knowledge and information, despite the quality of the information being provided in general. It is not only that stage managers are expected to do this kind of emotional labor, but also that they are supposed to be good at it in order to be considered successful.
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