Lower Class
The theatre process is hard to understand. An audience member can look at an actor and talk about how phenomenal they are or look at a production and say that it was the best that they have ever seen. But someone in that production may feel very differently. To an outsider, a show can look wonderfully executed, and very well put together. In the eyes of the crew, however, it is often far from it.
Criticism is shouted over the headset by those off stage who can actually shout without interrupting the production.
“That light cue was off!”
“Who missed their cue?!”
“Close the upstage traveler! It is open too much you have to fix it! NOW!”
“NO YOU’RE DOING EVERYTHING WRONG!”
These statements along with plenty of other nasty comments were yelled by the Middle Class to the Lower Class.
In every environment, there is a social class structure. Whether it is defined or not, there are always people who are higher up on the totem pole than others. There are the bosses in workplaces, the captains of sports teams, and the instructors of dance classes.
In a stage crew, like in many other organized groups of people, there is the “Upper Class” the “Middle Class” and the “Lower Class”. The Upper Class is the position with the most respect and the people who are typically awarded most of the credit. This class is lead by the director and occasionally consists of an assistant director, a producer, and an assistant producer as well. Then there is the “Middle Class” which is made up of the student leaders: the stage manager, the assistant stage manager, the student director, the crew chief, and the assistant crew chief. Lastly, you have the “Lower Class” which is the run crew, the people who are stuck at the bottom of a yelling chain that is a production. The people who have to run on stage in the dark on their knees to wipe up the water that was spilled on the ground by an actor who was supposed to be drunk all so that the actors entering from the other side of the stage in ten seconds won’t slip in their fight scene. Their job revolves around making everyone else on the totem pole look good.
In my most recent production, I was a member of the run crew, the Lower Class, and was unofficially appointed to “The Assistant Assistant Stage Manager” by the assistant stage manager to prevent him from going crazy. The Upper Class (the director) would yell at the Middle Class (the student leaders) and then I was in charge of preventing those student leaders from taking all of their anger and stress out on the Lower Class (the run crew). This didn’t always go as well as planned and often ended with the stage manager, the assistant stage manager, and I going into the stage manager’s car and screaming about how stressed and angry we were followed by us running laps around the school parking lot to get any extra anger out at 10:30pm after being at school for fifteen hours.
There were countless times that I, along with the rest of the Lower Class, was cursed at and told to shut up not for talking loud, not for fooling around, but for asking the Middle Class a simple question about the next scene change. This wasn’t because they were mad at us or didn’t like us. Everyone was just experiencing major stress and everyone took it out on the people below them in our stage crew social class structure, leaving the Lower Class to get the worst of it.
The theatre process is hard to understand. We start a show, fool around for a few weeks, get stressed out because work didn’t get done, get mad at the world and everyone in it and take our anger out on everyone involved in the production, cry together about how much we love each other, then repeat. As stressful as a production like this one can be, no one leaves it disliking one another because of what was said. Yes, we all get yelled at and deprived of sleep and stressed out to a point that is very unhealthy (members of the Middle Class especially), but we wouldn’t give it up for anything. In the end, no one cares about all of the horrible things that were said. We all get it. We all get that unfortunate things happen in the crazy moments of metal breakdowns and panic attacks that happen during a production to such an extent that in the end, we all sit down together and cry about how much we love each other and how much we enjoyed the experience. All “Theatre Kids” know that they secretly love the craziness of putting on a show, but they just don’t want to admit it. Because we wouldn’t keep doing it for so long if we didn’t love it.
