Journal Entry #12

Journal Entry #12

Power of Authority

                Stage managing for this semester has finished, and although I can say I am glad to have had the experience, I am also glad that it is over. Something that I continued to struggle with throughout the semester was trying to retain my authority as a production team member and stage manager.

                There were already major drawbacks set in place for me before the semester had started. First of all, I had not had nearly as much theater experience in my life as other members of the production team. I also have not had as much college experience in our theater troupe itself. My director this semester is one year my senior and so has had at least two semesters more of college theater knowledge than I.

                The biggest problem I could not combat because of my lack of authority was punctuality. I was not the authority head in the hierarchy of the production team. However, I was also not an equal at the top with the director. It was very clear that the director had declared herself captain of the ship long ago. This was fine at the time, but came with its drawbacks as the semester progressed.

                While it is all fine and good to send the cast and crew emails about scheduling, telling them that they have rehearsals at a certain time; the issue arises when people do not show up at the time rehearsal is called. Often, we would lose about fifteen minutes of rehearsal time that could be put to warming up, just because we are waiting around for others to show up. To my great dismay, there was nothing I could do about this dilemma because it was often the case that the director would show up late to rehearsal along with several cast members. I had no rights to admonish the cast about their tardiness, because then I would also have to be lecturing my fellow members of the production team as well.

                Authority is another one of Cialdini’s six principles of influence. Authority is influential to others because it points out that the social world views those with authority as experts, and experts are almost always right. I did not have this kind of influence over the cast because it was my first time stage managing and I was younger or the year as many of the cast and crew members.

                One issue that often arises when dealing with the power of authority is the idea of “captainitis”. This concept is described as when the captain of a ship makes a decision, all the crew members of that ship will go along with the captain’s decision because he or she is the authoritative figure. They will stick with what the captain says, even if the crew members know that it is was a poor decision. Luckily, we did not have any extreme downfalls in our play like those that happen when a team is suffering from “captainitis”.

                Production team cohesiveness needed to be maintained or else the show would fall apart, so I held my tongue about tardiness until tech week. At that point, I told them that there would be no more late arrivals during that week. That way, we would be able to start on time and hopefully end earlier so that the cast and crew as a whole could all be as efficient as possible. Thankfully, my director had the same desire to let the cast know of this change. Yet in the end it did not matter because the actors had an hour of scheduled time to get into costume and makeup. The plan had been made weeks before that as long as they were ready by 6:30 pm there would be no repercussions. This gave many of the actors freedom to walk in whenever they so pleased, and so our rule for tech week became a moot point.

                Hopefully in future semesters of stage managing I will be able to assert more influence over the cast and crew so that I may be able to help everyone use rehearsal time appropriately. In spite of this, it has been a great semester of learning, and I know I can only move forward from here.