Lesson 24: Scene Breakdown

The SCENE BREAKDOWN is the job of a stage-manager and a director.  The stage-manager will take the BEATS, a director, has come up with for a play and with the director advising, list for each BEAT what will be required for it.  If you take a look below, you will see an example of a SCENE BREAKDOWN, for the short play by D.M. Larson called "Pity the Fool".

In Lesson 23, you saw how I would start breaking the scene down into BEATS.  Now if you look at the picture above, you can see how the stage-manager would look at each beat and decided what was needed in terms of set, props, and costumes.  

The idea is to do this before you even meet the actors, so that you begin to have a clear picture of what you want the production to look like before you are biased by seeing the actors in their roles.  It allows both the director and the stage-manager to build a vision of the production and to try and maintain the integrity of that vision.