I recently saw a play, "Churchill in shorts" it’s a collection of plays and it consists of three one acts. what was interesting was that after each act, the actors rearranged the stage themselves for the next act. Isn’t that something the stage workers should do? i was wondering if anyone knew why the actors would arrange the stage themselves, the play is supposed to be short though but even though, why would the actors do that.
Various reasons: there may be no stage crew – financially it may not be feasible to hire people to move scenery around. It could be an artistic choice – sometimes directors have actors change the set "in character" to connect scenes or short pieces into a complete piece.
Nine times out of ten it’s the lack of stage crew. When you’re doing a show for very little money, you sometimes have to ask stage crew to work for free and very few people will do that, so you’re left with just the actors to pitch in. This was partially the case with my show when it went up in January. Additionally, using my five actors meant the scene changes could happen in thirty to forty-five seconds instead of the two minutes that it would have taken for only two stage hands to change over.
This all changes when you’re dealing with Equity (Union) theatre where actors are not ALLOWED to change scenery nor in many cases carry props off stage unless its written in the script/direction.
