The Director as Collaborator, 2nd Edition

Chapter 5Design Collaboration

In your early work as a director, in most cases your ensemble will consist primarily, if not exclusively, of actors. If you are very fortunate, you might have a stage manager during rehearsals, and he or she might run the show in production or work with an assistant stage manager or a light and/or sound board operator to implement some basic lighting or sound cues. Generally, though, you will not have a design team for your first directing projects; instead, you will design the production to the best of your abilities with little or no budget. You might run sound cues from a digital music player, smartphone, or computer, through a portable speaker. In these first productions, you will be directing and producing “poor ...