Become a Stage Director

A career as a stage director takes talent, experience, and temperament. Stage directors have to know theaters inside out. Be prepared to work long hours, and handle intense stress. It’s an incredibly difficult field in which to make it. If you are talented, completely committed, and prepared to endure years of hard work for little money. It’s possible to realize your dream of becoming a stage director.

Steps

Learning about Drama

1. Be part of your school's drama department. When you're in high school, get involved in your school's drama department. Some theater departments allow students to direct plays. If you can't direct, get experience doing every other aspect of theater. This will help make you marketable in addition to helping you get into theater college programs.
   • Look into youth theater in your area. A lot of community theaters let teenagers take part in their productions. Look for any opportunities to get experience.
   • Act in productions and work as a stage manager. Run the lights and the props. Find out what you're best at, and what you love to do best.
   • Ask your teacher for a realistic assessment of your talents.
2. Read everything you can. Theater is, of course, highly literary, and the main part of a director’s job is to interpret a written text. If you want to make it as a director, you need to feed your passion for drama by immersing yourself in it. Reading will help you to develop your ideas and approaches while giving you a deep well of knowledge to draw on. By reading about the context of your favorite plays, you will learn much more about them, which will feed into your ideas about how to direct plays.
   • Read plays, novels, screenplays, and adaptations, as well as literary criticism, history, and biography.
   • Take one of your favorite plays and try to develop a deeper understanding by reading around it. For example, if you love Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, read some of his other plays and novels to get a fuller understanding of him as a writer.
   • You can also read some biographies and literary criticism, as well as social or cultural histories about the time and place in which he lived and wrote. Ask yourself how this extra knowledge can inform your interpretation of the play.
   • Imagine you are trying to explain a character to an actor, and write down some thoughts on how you would do this for practice.
3. Go to the theater. If you want to be a stage director, you should go to the theater as much as possible. See as wide an array of plays as you can to broaden your knowledge and give you an insight into staging and production. Go to every kind of theater you can, from the best theater in New York to a tiny community or school theater in a small town. The more plays you see, the more knowledge and understanding you will have.
   • See a variety of plays. See classics, experimental, children's, and musicals. Even if the play is terrible, you will likely learn something.
   • Go see different adaptations of the same play. Seeing the way different theaters perform the same play - or plays by the same playwright or from the same period - can teach you a lot about directing.
   • See plays in other countries. Translate plays from other languages if you can. This can give you a unique perspective on the theater world and performances.
   • Many theater productions have question and answer sessions after some performances. Attend these sessions and ask questions, or listen to the playwright, director, and actors discuss their process.

Getting a Formal Theater Education

1. Get a bachelor's degree in a related field. Directing is very hands-on and practical, but a director will have a bachelor’s degree in theater production or some related media or arts field. Decide which schools will be the best for your career goals and your financial situation.
   • Find a city with notable theaters and theater programs. Charleston, Boston, San Francisco, New York, and Portland are all great cities of the arts with good training programs.
   • Think carefully about what you want to study, and speak to people in the departments you are considering.
   • Directors include graduates in drama, English literature, music, creative and performing arts, and foreign languages. Other humanities topics such as history, philosophy, and psychology can all be a good foundation.
2. Consider alternatives to universities. If you can't afford a prestigious university, go to a state college with a thriving drama department. Although there will be some prestige attached to famous institutions, a state college with a very active department could be a great place to get lots of hands on experience in a variety of settings.
   • While at the state college, make sure to build your resume by participating in theater productions, summer institutes, community theater, workshops, and anything else you can find.
3. Consider graduate courses. Some performing arts schools have master’s programs in directing, which can be excellent way to learn the skills if you studied something unrelated. With a bachelor’s degree, you can start a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) course. These can be highly selective, and will include extensive study of theory and criticism as well as practical skills.
   • If you have a relevant degree and a reasonable amount of experience, graduate courses are certainly not essential, and can be very expensive.
   • This could be particularly appropriate if your first degree is in a topic quite far removed for theater and drama.
4. Don’t stop learning. Keep looking out for and attending workshops, drama labs, and short courses even after you graduate. This will help you to constantly develop and will introduce you to new ideas and new people all the time. The theater is always changing so refreshing your education regularly is a good idea.

Getting Practical Experience

1. Get involved in the university drama society. Directors acquire a lot of skills through experience and practice. When you are studying, you can work with your friends and fellow students to produce and direct plays. It will be a great chance to experience what it’s like to produce a play with no budget, and you will learn a lot about collaborating and improvising.
   • Becoming a member of the drama society will also help to get to know lots of people who have similar interests.
2. Get experience outside of university. Look beyond your courses for opportunities to become involved in theater in your city. One way to get an insight into how a theater runs is to work as an usher part time while you’re at college. You’ll come to know audiences and staff and maybe meet some people who can give you good advice.
   • You can also get involved in local amateur drama groups as a volunteer.
   • With smaller community groups, you may find that you will be given more responsibility and more opportunity to contribute to all aspects of productions.
3. Fill your summers with theater. Try to get involved with local programs during the summer break. Ask your professors to help you find them. It doesn't matter what you do there; just get in and do something - acting, stage managing, handling props, lighting, set building. Do whatever and as much as you can.
   • Make a great impression on the people who run the program because you will need their recommendations later on.
   • Look for opportunities with summer stock theaters.
4. Get to know as many roles in the theater as possible. Keep an open mind and try to get involved in all aspects. You will learn valuable lessons that you can take with you. Learning how to change a set, run lighting and arrange costumes are all skills that will help a director.
   • As a director, you will be better able to communicate with all the specialist staff if you have some experience with what their work entails.
   • At all stages of the game, tell everyone you are "learning to be a director," not "I want to be a director." Ask everyone in charge of anything to "teach me how to do that." People love that, and it shows the right state of mind. Be humble, but not shy or retiring. Show your passion without your ego.
5. Learn about the actors. To be a good theater director, you must love and enjoy being around actors. Meeting actors and talking to actors helps you begin to understand what role they will play in the theater production. Start to learn about the relationship between a director and an actor. Take this time to understand the creative process of an actor so you know what they go through every night.
   • Consider taking acting classes. This helps you go through the same processes that actors will go through, so you can put yourself in their shoes.
6. Learn to deal with people. One the main things that directors have to do is deal with people. You have to inspire them, but more important, you have to make people do what you want them to do. Sometimes, that means making people play roles they may be unhappy playing. Learning how to relate, talk to, and inspire people will help you be successful.

Beginning your Career

1. Join a network for young directors. There are plenty of organizations and networks out there for young aspiring directors. Being a member of a network will help you stay in touch with your peers and will make it easier to stay in the know about news and job opportunities.
   • It can also be nice just to talk to people who are experiencing the same thing as you.
   • You can join a relevant union, such as the Actor's Equity Union, to keep updated on news in the industry.
2. Meet people and network. Many directors get jobs through networking and contacts. After college, move to Los Angeles or New York or another town with an active theater community. Visit the little workshops and theaters until you are able to land a job doing something. During this time, keep meeting people and making contacts. Keep a list of these contacts, and keep in touch with these people. This will help you as you start directing.
   • Try to move up the hierarchy, and if you have acting talent, try to get parts. If not, continue stage-managing and learn all you can.
   • Acquiring a broad range of experience is very helpful for your directing skills and can help pay the bills as you develop your career.
   • Always be on the look out for a place at the next-best theater and try to move up the ladder in size, prestige, and quality of production.
3. Work as an assistant to a director. Working as an assistant is a great way to get your foot in the door and experience what life is like for a stage director. If you respect a local director and would love to work for that person, write him/her a letter with a CV and some information about yourself. Say what you can bring to the table, and why specifically you want to work with this director.
   • It’s possible that people will offer you unpaid work assisting as an intern. This can be great experience, but isn’t sustainable in the long term.
   • As an assistant, you should be dedicated and enthusiastic, but keep in mind that you don’t want to stay an assistant forever. Try to keep your career progressing outside of your assistant job.
   • While you should be committed to your director, be sure you don’t end up mimicking the director in your own approach. Don’t lose sight of your own voice and style.
4. Take work when you can find it, and be prepared for a struggle. The early career of a stage director is almost always going to very difficult and frustrating. Keep an open mind about work and think about what kind of roles could help you develop your skills and experience.
   • Investigate running youth workshops, or working on community theater projects. Look for any avenue to get experience and contacts.
   • Bear in mind that it will most likely take years to become a full-fledged director with a reliable income, and that many people never achieve it.
5. Meet playwrights. Playwrights are the creative brain behind plays. Start meeting playwrights, getting to know them, and talking about their work. Talk with them about their process, and get them to help you understand the play better.
   • The more playwrights you befriend and meet, the more your name is put into the theater world. Think about this as networking. Interacting with playwrights can help them get to know you so they can ask you to direct their plays.

Putting on Plays

1. Form a company. While making ends meet, don’t lose sight of your goal. Get together with some of your like-minded friends and peers and form a company. Don’t worry about the size, and remember that throughout the history of theater small companies have been essential. It is part of the essence of theater.
   • Forming your own company is great experience to help you learn how to direct and how to work with the other members of a theater production.
2. Put on a play. The next step is to put on a show which you direct, somehow, somewhere. Perhaps the theater with which you're affiliated will let you direct a little show, or perhaps you and your friends can rent a theater and present your own. Sometimes, directing children's plays can be a good step.
   • A children's play can be a lot of fun, and you might find you really enjoy working with kids and would like to develop these skills.
3. Learn to manage a budget. This is a crucial skill to develop. You will have to spend time fundraising for the production. You will also have to market your play to attract an audience. These are duties that go beyond working with the actors.
   • Learning about how a theater's finances function and the costs of staging a play are crucial parts of your practical education.
4. Learn from your successes and your failures. You will learn so much from the experience of actually putting on a play independently of your school or college. Analyze what you do and make notes on how to improve. Think about your interactions with everyone involved, from actors to set designers. One of the most important things you will learn is how to work with a large group of people, many of whom will be working for little or no money.
   • Understanding everybody's motivations for working in the theater will help you work together.
   • Evaluating the financial results will show you how much the play really cost, and highlight if you need to do more work on fundraising or on attracting larger audiences.
5. Don't give up. Becoming a theater director is a long, grueling process. It's about finding and making opportunities and hard work, but also entails ability and a little but of luck. Be prepared for setbacks and struggles along the road, but keep your enthusiasm for the theater.
   • One way to do this is to keep discovering new things in the performing arts and exposing yourself to them. This will help you stimulate ideas, which will all contribute to the development of your own unique directorial vision. Go to conferences, workshops, and other events to constantly learn and expand yourself.
   • Read specialist publications on new theater and criticism to refresh your ideas.

Tips

• Go to every performance of every play you're involved in. Go to every play you can, period.
• Meet deadlines, every time.
• Keep up with current events. Not only will it keep you in the real world, but it's important information for all directors.

Warnings

• Never pay someone to let you act or direct.
• Stay humble.

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References

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