The Technical Director's Toolkit

Process, Forms, and Philosophies for Successful Technical Direction

Zachary Stribling, Richard Girtain

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317752622
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Médias et arts de la scène
• Subtopic: Théâtre

In the world of theatre, the technical director is responsible for overseeing the safe and efficient realization and implementation of scenery for the stage. The Technical Director's Toolkit is the first book to address every nut and bolt of this multifaceted job.

This book guides readers though the step-by-step processes of technical direction and the responsibilities of the TD in the mounting of a theatrical production. Leadership, management, relationship building, personal responsibility, and problem solving are addressed, demonstrating not only how to become a more efficient and effective TD, but also how to be a collaborative member of a production team that artists will seek to work with again and again. The book also addresses scene shop design, facility repair and maintenance, and finishes with a brief overview of other areas of technical theatre that help round out the far reaching skill set of a successful TD.

This book is perfect for university courses in Stagecraft and Technical Direction and for the aspiring Technical Director.

Chapter 1

Communication, Collaboration, and Flexibility

The Mores of Success

Theatre is a truly unique art form, as we work collaboratively as a group to create, teach, and entertain. While some studio art is created by a collective or team, there is no one person theatre. We are obligated by the nature of our passion to work alongside others, to share in a vision, and to help realize something much greater than one’s self. Swimming in a sea of theatre artists are the facilitators like the technical director, or TD for short. We are artistic individuals, large-scale sculptors of environments, but our endeavors are grounded in a pragmatic knowledge of material sciences, tried and true construction methodologies, organized behaviors, and physics. These analytical activities and practical knowledge bases are blended with our artistic sensibilities and drive to create, giving us the unique foundation necessary to succeed as a theatrical TD.

Our job is a genuine original, a rollercoaster ride of new projects, conflicting emotions, and uncertainty. Some have likened it to herding kittens in the dark. We think it is one of the most beautiful things we have done in our lives. It is a career choice that with every opening night fulfills a drive to create, validates us as artists, affirms our leadership, and sets us off on another soon to be realized adventure. We rarely end up doing the same thing twice. Every production is unique. Even if we have done the show before, the list of players and their ideas are different. There is no repetition or rut to be found. The job description is constantly changing. The technology utilized is always evolving. The solutions and challenges are often different. If you are a person that thrives on routine and certainty, then the theatre and Technical Direction are probably not for you.

To borrow from F.D.R.’s three-legged stool metaphor, the first leg of a successful TD is collaboration. In this line of work you have to be able to play nicely with others. Creating theatre is a truly collaborative experience, and it happens among a small community. For an art form spanning millennia and every pocket of the civilized world, the group of active artists is remarkably small and interconnected. To keep getting work, we have to be people persons and exercise strong communication skills. Tread lightly and make no enemies. Be a pleasure to work with by being dedicated, responsible, and a team player. There is no us against them in theatre, only teammates working toward a common goal. We are not being Pollyanna about the way relationships work within the theatre community. There will be people you will like and dislike working with your whole career, but it is your responsibility to keep it professional and continue plugging away toward your common goal with a collegial attitude and dedication to the project.

The number one complaint in any organization, despite how well they do it, is the second leg of our stool: communication. It is a vital ingredient to successful collaboration, and as a TD you must master it both as an interpersonal skill and as an organization skill. You have to get people to trust and follow you, and communication is the key to both. Learning how to talk to people is an art unto itself. Doing it successfully requires assessing what each individual needs to make them feel listened to and respected. These sentiments lead directly to them hearing you and not just listening to you. Be it a member of your staff like a carpenter, a scenic designer as a collaborator, or a producer as a stakeholder, you have to learn how to read the individual and react appropriately to their needs and personality type. Organizing information is just as important as a TD. You cannot just spew every fact and figure regarding your technical design, estimate package, or build schedule upon anyone needing details. Again, you have to be able to assess their readiness as to what information they specifically need and in what form and level of detail. Putting together information that makes sense is just as important as putting together information that is valid and thorough.

The third leg to the stool that is success in technical direction is flexibility. The nature of our work demands it. We are called upon to create a different dream every production, and our methodologies for doing so must shift with the individual needs of the design. We have to change the way we communicate with every designer that we work with according to their working style and level of readiness. Our process itself needs constant revision and improvement so that we might do our job even better on the next production. As the technology utilized in our field changes, as it does so rapidly these days, so must we change the way we dictate a build to utilize the most efficient and up-to-date construction processes. Finally, we have to be flexible enough to change the responsibilities and nature of our job as the description of our duties varies wildly from organization to organization and even season to season. H. G. Wells penned in Mind at the End of Its Tether, “Adapt or perish, now as ever, is nature’s inexorable imperative.” Our world, macro and micro, demands it of us, and to succeed in our field we must be ready to change to suit the needs of the organization that we choose to be a part of.

These are the guiding principles that we believe form the foundation upon which you can build a successful career as a professional TD. This section of the book will cover how to manage yourself and the relationships with your collaborators in a way that reflects these core beliefs. Coming back full circle, in the last chapter we will expand upon how we as TDs can work more effectively with our specific collaborators. This is not the way; it is a way. I hope that these mores that we hold dear help you to build a set of professional ethos that help guide you to success in all of your endeavors theatrical.

1.1 The Job: Never the Same Story Twice

Like an old fish tale your father has told you and your family countless times, the details of the TD’s job change every time. Pinning down your specific job description is like catching a minnow with your bare hands. Like we said before, by the very nature of what we have to create our job is randomized. One week we might be engineering an articulated wall of aluminum and Styrofoam faux concrete and a month later be reproducing a sitting room from an eighteenth-century Parisian salon. You just never know what the next show is going to bring as a challenge, and to succeed you have to embrace the unknown and attack it with confidence and authority. Even if you have no idea how to build it and have never done anything like it in your history, you have to know in your heart that within your toolkit and community of contemporaries lies the solution, and have the confidence that you can both draw it out and execute it flawlessly.

Every day we thank the heavens that, like in the movie Office Space, we don’t work in a cubicle, filing the same TPS reports every week and coveting iconic office supplies for thrills. Instead we work in a dust-filled fantasy land where sparks fly, and we harness the elements to do our bidding and build the things dreams are made of. We create play scapes, islands, living rooms, forests, and seeming endless expanses of desolate isolation where everyone from Patrick Stewart to your Aunt Maggie’s tenth-grade daughter becomes someone else to tell a story. We give people emotional release, hope, despair, and escape. We create magic, and rest assured every month you can find yourself confronted with a fresh challenge requiring you to think outside the box and innovate. There is never a dull moment, and we are blessed by this apparent chaos.

Like the production challenges that we face, our job description is constantly under revision and development. Organizations are living organisms, forced to move and adapt to their market and climate. A stagnant theatre company is one that will soon close its doors for good. The organizational structure is constantly shifting as people come in and out of the company, and the job requirements change with the individual’s strengths and weaknesses. One production manager (PM) will have a whole different set of needs regarding their TD than another. While TDs are typically stereotyped as rigid professionals that deal in concrete details, the truly successful in our line of work are flexible individuals that actually relish in changing to make things function smoother.

This fluid relationship that we have with our job description can best be illustrated by how one might employ their assistant technical directors (ATDs). Should you hire an assistant who is a crack shot at drafting, who enjoys it and is highly proficient in AutoCAD, then you would obviously use them for that purpose and offload as much of the construction drafting as possible to them. This gives them the type of work they enjoy and uses them to the best of their capabilities. Meanwhile you focus on the day-to-day operations of the scene shop, scheduling, tracking, and putting together estimate packages. On the flip side, if your assistant is just an all around great person and strong leader, then you would use your assistant and his or her skills with communication and likeability to run the shop operations and interact with the staff during the build. You would bear the brunt of the drafting so that he or she might best apply his or her skills in that other arena. You cannot force a bad draftsperson to draft better, and you cannot make a wet blanket of an ATD work the floor and motivate the carpenters. Your job as the leader and manager is to look at the personnel resources that you have available and use them in the role that they are most efficient and ready for. As that personnel changes and you get new assistants, you have to be willing to change and adapt the operations to best suit the new variable. It is just what we do as a manager of many.

As you transition between different employers and producing organizations, you again have to be willing to adapt. We have worked for organizations that, by nature of lacking a PM, needed us to step up to the plate and create the overall production calendar for the season. This included working hand in hand with the producers to derive the actual dates of the run. While this falls way outside of the typical job description of the TD, we saw a need and stepped up to bat. We were the ones within the organization who had a vision wide enough to organize a season because we do it so well with the builds. We were the ones with calendar building and managing skills who could reference prior seasons schedules and work with the production departments to transcribe what they needed done differently into fresh season calendars with change analysis and comparison data that was easy for all to grasp. Because we could do it for the studio, we knew that we could do it for the organization and reap the multitude of benefits from having that influence and authority to aid the shop and staff.

In some shops the TD is not allowed to touch a tool or material, while in others the TD is a vital part of the scenery construction crew, working alongside of and motivating their crew with their energy and enthusiasm. Sometimes you will have a scene shop manager who keeps the wheels on track for you, and sometimes that responsibility will fall on you. Although Industry-leading organizations like the United States Institute for Theatre Technology (USITT) have worked hard to develop promotion and tenure guidelines for academic TDs and conducted numerous TD job surveys to help define the responsibilities of the job, there is no singular definitive job description for what we do. The generalities of the job are relatively universal among the different organizations that employ TDs, but the specific tasks and scope of management vary from place to place. You have to be a Jack of all trades who is willing to employ the skills needed by the given organization and let others languish in idle because it is someone else’s responsibility. Every organization does its business differently and comes with traditions and biases. It is up to you to analyze the organization and adapt your skill sets to best fit their needs. Find out how things have been done in the past and start there. An effective leader is always making change happen, and over time you will be able to evolve the culture of the organization to function better and suit your needs and strengths as an individual. You have to be able to perceive and discern between what you can change and what is immovable. You cannot come into a new position with your organizational guns a blazing, ready to flip the culture on its head, but on the other side of the coin you cannot come in and expect to keep up business as usual. Adaptation is a two way street that leads to success, but you need to come in not like an avalanche but with the methodical determination of an iceberg.

Responsibilities: One Head, Many Hats

The work of a TD is a many-headed beast. Like the last section posited, it is near to impossible to nail down a full job description for any TD position anywhere in the world. You could be a manager for a road house, an assistant professor at a major state university, in charge of an independent scenic studio producing corporate trade show booths, or a leader of a twenty-person union scene shop for a major regional theatre producing $150,000 sets. In each of these positions the job of the TD is quite different, with a definition equally as illusive.

This book means to focus primarily on a traditional and ideal definition of a theatrical TD who is producing a season of shows. This scenario takes place in countless regional, educational, and summer theatres across the nation and the world. The support staffing and outlying responsibilities vary drastically from place to place, but the guiding principles and base responsibilities remain part of a common core. Our position exists to make dreams happen—to take an artistic vision for a production’s scenic design and realize it to its fullest potential. To do that effectively we have to take on ownership and responsibility for that vision. It is our cross to bear, to serve as the bottom line for getting it done safely, on time, and within the constraints of our budget. Our process is what guides us through from page to stage, and we must give appropriate time and attention to each and every step along the way, or we cause chinks in the armor, weak spots where, if the stars do not align, the walls can come crashing down around us. Without proper planning, implementation is futile. To that end, the TD is a project manager.

Project management is a job that holds meaning across a wide variety of industries. From home construction to advertising, a project manager is someone who has a handle on the steps necessary to properly plan and implement a function of the business they are a part of. It takes extremely strong organizational skills to manage all of the steps along the way, from concept to reality, and being in touch with the nitty-gritty of the implementation is a must. Without having been a carpenter in a scene shop, it is hard to know what is needed to build a set piece. Having not done graphic design and market analysis, one cannot put begin to manage an effective advertising campaign. You have to master a craft before you can effectively charge others with its actuation. Almost all of the successful TDs that we know came up through a traditional master/apprentice learning process. Despite the master of fine arts (MFA) degree on their office wall, they were an intern, carpenter, master carpenter, and ATD for a long time before they became TDs.

As a project manager, you also have to be able to “push paper.” Putting together the plan is all theoretical work until the hammers start swinging. Mastering our industry’s application of software like Microsoft Excel and Project, AutoCAD, and cloud storage and sharing solutions are a necessity for building calendars, deriving budget and time estimates, creating construction specifications, and keeping the scene shop machine humming instead of stuttering. Using these tools effectively and producing elegant and concise documentation gives you instant credibility with stakeholders, collaborators, and followers. An effective project manager keeps all of this paperwork in order and organized for quick reference. By double checking that they have crossed all of the ts and dotted all of the is, they ensure that the process has been followed and the implementation will be a success.

The TD is a leader and a manager. These are two distinct but closely related concepts. The manager rules the roost, keeping the crews on track by ensuring that the materials and hardware are flowing, the necessary tools are ready and working, and the order of the day is being followed. An effective manager supervises their personnel and squares away the logistics of an operation to keep the crews running at an optimal efficiency. Managing personnel means making sure everyone is getting paid and is well trained and equipped for their work. Following through on the planning and groundwork laid out by the project manager, the manager of a scenic studio makes sure that the instructions are followed and that the resources are in place to keep the ship righted and on course. Being able to perceive the bumps along the way and working to abate them is the work of a proactive manager, while being able to improvise and quickly come up with inspired solutions when confronted with a problem is the work of a reactive manager. You must strive to be a healthy blend of the two when managing a scenic studio. An effective manager must also establish authority, respect, and trust with their followers, but a leader realizes that all of these things are a two-way street.

A leader inspires their followers and makes them want to do their very best because they believe that the very best is what their leader is giving of their own self. Sensing the needs of your followers and discreetly catering to them is the function of a leader. Get the crew a water cooler for the break room. They will stay well hydrated during the course of their work day and maintain more productive energy levels—a small investment with a big payoff. Stock the freezer with popsicles. They are refreshing on those hot summer days of the build and give the crew a boost of sugar-induced energy in the afternoon, counteracting the digestion of their lunch that is trying to lull them into inaction. These small gestures mean a lot, both in their face value and unconsciously, demonstrating the investment that you have in those that follow you and their happiness. As the manager, you conduct performance appraisals at regular intervals with the artisans in your charge; a leader takes that time to listen to the employee. Take their thoughts and concerns seriously, and let your attention and empathy make them feel valued, respected, and heard. A leader realizes that they don’t know everything about the craft and trusts the craftsman in their charge to teach them and innovate on their own. Leadership boils down to two pure mutual concepts at its core: respect and trust. Management of a scenic studio can be handed to you, while leadership must be built and earned.

A TD is a draftsperson and a scientist. In creating our technical designs we must be a master of material sciences. A working knowledge of statics and the structural properties of materials and construction methodologies is necessary for designing structures that work and function elegantly. Dynamics and an understanding of mechanics are needed to create the stage machinery that makes theatre magic happen safely and dependably. We must have an understanding of graphic standards and cutting-edge computer-assisted modeling and drafting software to specify these well-reasoned designs clearly to help artisans to understand what they are creating.

A TD is a problem solver. Brainstorming your way through new and exciting challenges on a weekly basis, you have to be able to both innovate forward and look backward to tried methodologies in designing solutions. Thinking outside the box but within the realm of reality, the TD must adapt old ways to solve new problems with creative and dynamic solutions. Problem solving has its own process to follow, and the input that a leader can solicit from their followers is vital to the process. You are not alone in problem solving. There is a whole shop full of creative solution makers and your professional network of contemporaries at your beck and call if you nurture those relationships with trust and reciprocity.

The TD is a collaborator. A TD works as part of a collective where everyone plays their part in the realization of a common goal, and he or she must possess gr...