Is It Worth It To Become A Stage Manager?

It’s that wonderful time of year again where I question what has possessed me to pick this occupation. Today I almost quit. Like – almost walked off the job quit.

The amount of stress caused by stage managing is just the most ridiculous thing. Why do we even do this? Tonight was our first performance with an invited public and, despite an awful lot of little snags they didn’t really know about, it went pretty well. But the rush I usually get definitely wasn’t there. This has been an unusually rough rehearsal period.

I’ve learned, it’s fishy when it starts out good. The TD and I were talking about how much easier this year seemed than last year just two weeks ago, and then we hit tech and it quickly spiraled. One of our crew chiefs isn’t very competent, so trying to cram double checking his work into our days has become very stressful and not always totally possible.

To make it worse, we hired him. Some of the performers this year are really difficult. The costumes are still not done despite having an audience today. A piece of the rigging equipment malfunctioned during the show today. We’re missing some run crew. There are issues with the RVs.

We’re in the middle of nowhere and no one has a car and everyone needs a ride places. I feel like I’m trying to do six jobs at once and none of them well. I also felt like an extra dose of failure when the owner of the circus felt like he had to give me a pep talk today. Ugh. So.

It’s been a good week. And it’s once again left me wondering things like – why can’t we accomplish anything in 40 hour work weeks, why does it have to be 105 hour work weeks. Doesn’t anyone else see that this is not ok? Coming back to is it worth it to be a stage manager, I think back on all the people I met back in college who worked in the arts that our professors would bring in to teach us about the “real world” – so many of them told us to do something different.

I think I have always liked the idea of rising to challenges and succeeding at difficult tasks, but what happens when you make a career out of that with a lot of other folks who also thrive in insane environments?

What seems to happen is the environments never get better – and just because you can do something doesn’t always mean you want to. And those are tonight’s tech week ravings.