On Performance Management,
or Notes from the SM

I think our tendency, as scholars of theater and performance, is to turn to the messy performance reports, the ones full of incident that aroused the stage manager's attention and left an unusual trace in the archive. But I've been arguing in my recent work against this form of archival exceptionalism and seeking a scholarship that better understands the average. In this paper, I want to outline a study of stage manager's reports focused on the normal, rather than the exceptional cases. And I'm going to demonstrate how that attention might shift the emphasis of some of our scholarship.

Morning's at Seven played 581 total performances: 16 previews, an Actor's Fund benefit, and 564 regular performances. I have 579 stage managers' performance reports from this revival, all collected at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.

So the first lesson from these reports is that our scholarship should pay more attention to the remarkable precision with which professional artists execute their craft. By definition, precise performances are repetitive and minimize variation, thus lacking the unpredictability that marks performance's liveness. But we can and should admire precision, just as Sara Jane Bailes teaches us to admire modern theater's performance of failure and Stacy Wolf urges us to to admire the amateur's exuberant joy. These reports document professional work at the highest level, characterized chiefly by remarkable precision.

Now, because professional work is so precise, we can use variations in the performance to think about how companies maintain a production's integrity and, indeed, what a production, over time, actually is. The playing time's overall precision does not mean that the playing time did not vary. We can plot the performance timings in a line chart, from the first preview until closing night.

And now I'll make a second interpretive assertion: the changing performance timings indicate a shift in the ontology of the production itself. In other words, we should think of theatrical productions not only as collections of texts, designs, people, and interpretations, but also as the average of a collection's iterative realizations in performance. A production is an average, normal performance. When a performance deviates too far from the average, the production itself becomes foggy and harder to discern. And when the production's average changes, the production itself also changes.

Let me work through my thinking more slowly. Performance timings give us one view of a production's general shape, of what the production, qua production, is. (Obviously, a production of Morning's at Seven that regularly ran three hours, even if we knew nothing else about it, would be very different from this production.) Now, on the one hand, that shape has to be fuzzy: our definition of a production cannot require absolute repetition at every performance—we must allow for some variation in execution. On the other hand, some variations will exceed acceptable boundaries. If those variations are temporary, they might indicate an aberrant performance. But if the changes seem more lasting, they indicate a real change in the production itself.

Thus, not every personnel change disturbs the production's integrity; some changes might redefine a production, others might not. But personnel changes do place a significant strain on production integrity and pose a particular challenge to the company.

Personnel changes are a surprisingly persistent challenge in these reports. Consider just the actors. Morning's at Seven has nine roles, understudied by five performers at a time. Ultimately, twenty-one actors performed in this revival on Broadway.

Morning's at Seven Cast Members

Those twenty-one actors combined to form thirty-eight unique cast configurations on stage during the run. The following table shows each of those casts and the number of times they performed in that arrangement. I've ranked each configuration from 1 to 38.

Morning's at Seven Cast Configurations

Many of those cast changes, of course, featured understudies. Almost two in every five performances—or, in an eight-performance week, three performances per week—included an understudy. And no matter how able, understudies disrupt any company's work. As stage manager Marnel Sumner put it in a note on performance 135, "the first performance for any understudy […] tests the mettle of not just the understudy in question […] but also the stage managers, the other members of the cast, the wardrobe and hair departments—everyone involved in getting the show on." Crew replacements could pose similar challenges. "A new man on house curtain and it was slow!" Sumner complained in a technical note. When the flyman changed again later in the run, the same problem arose, leading Sumner to arrange a "curtain rehearsal" at half-hour. Understudies thus challenge the production's ability to function, requiring extra labor to maintain production integrity.

Understudies represent only one form of temporary variation that might disrupt a performance. The stage managers' reports catalogue a stream of mistakes and disturbances, though of varying significance, for a total of 511 recorded incidents.

If we can look at a breakdown of errors at each performance, subdivided by their cause, we see that Gary Merrill and Kate Reid both had concentrated periods of erratic behavior that risked throwing performances off track. In Merrill's case, he seems to have had manic episodes, particularly after the surprisingly successful opening, that lead to strange offstage incidents and an unreliable monologue on stage. Kate Reid's early performances as a replacement cast member were notably uneven as she struggled with lines and seemed, from Sumner's perspective, not to understand how her part fit into the rest of the show. Fundamentally, however, the company behaved with high professionalism, focused on identifying and mitigating problems, not creating them.

Many of the problems the company managed came from exogenous disruptive forces. Audiences, for instance, caused 68 distinct incidents noted in these reports and were thus the biggest challenge to the show. Disruptions ranged from noisy drunks to an ill patron who vomited in the mezzanine during the first intermission.

Even when the audience behaved, the theater itself often did not. The backstage temperature became a near constant source of complaint in the winter, often solved by turning on a heating system that caused loud clanging in the pipes. Sumner thought temperature very important to the company's performance and to the show's reception. As he noted after performance 363: "It's the first time this week that the auditorium was comfortable. We also gave our best show and got our best reaction. I wonder if these facts are related."

Keeping up the production, of course, was not simply a matter for daily management, but required occasional course-corrections from someone with a more remote perspective on the proceedings. Thus director Vivian Matalon attended performances to take and give notes. The notes, however, often threw the company off its focus at the subsequent performance. "The first performance following a director's note session is a poor one," Sumner observed. "One in which the actors play the notes instead of the character and/or the play. One could almost feel a hesitation before each line that contained a note and then the actor proceeded to louse it up." This reveals an important distinction between the company's success in any given performance and the production's general integrity. Clearly, the work required to hone the production over time was worth an occasional stiff and uncertain performance.

Such maintenance, of course, was also literal. The set included grass, which, due to daily trampling by the actors, required frequent regluing. Wooden stairs broke, lighting equipment fell out of alignment, wigs grew disheveled, understudies went through their paces in anticipation of the next illness or accident. The day-to-day work of keeping the production up, keeping things functioning, consumed enormous time and effort. Few of these problems would have distorted the production so as to make it incomprehensible: the "noise" of any one flubbed line or missed light cue would not, by itself, distort the "signal" of any given performance. But taken cumulatively, these problems could eat away at the production until they did distort that signal and the information the company had labored to communicate through its rehearsal and preview period would have been lost amidst sloppy, error-ridden work. (This is, of course, the comic structure of Michael Frayn's great backstage farce, Noises Off.)

I want to recognize that many of my readers likely have an intimate knowledge of the professional theater's operation and thus the details I've highlighted from Morning's at Seven's long run are familiar and unsurprising. But as much as we might know these things about how theater works, I suggest that we, as a discipline, tend not to foreground their importance to theater's operation. And here I want offer a final interpretive frame for considering this archive and return to the point with which I began.

Viewed one way, these stage manager's reports document an endless series of threats to the production's integrity—the exceptions, the failures that hover over every performance and give performance its frisson of liveness. But difference here is not the company's organizing principle—rather, they seek sameness. Too much emphasis on performance's variability occludes the true goal of so much labor: performance sustainability. A history of Morning's at Seven's exceptionally unruly or erratic performances would miss its real achievement, namely, the precision with which the company maintained an integral production. That production is a moving target, responsive to changes in the cast, in particular. But executing that production with precision and care is, these reports make abundantly clear, the primary focus of the company's work together.

So I invite you to join me in thinking more about the repetition inherent in so many theater practices, exemplified here by the long-running commercial show. When you repeat a production, at some point the work of performance has less to do with art and interpretation than with that word suggested by the stage manager's title: management. Yes, a theatrical performance is a system of signs. Yes, a theatrical performance is a phenomenal and affective experience. But a theatrical performance also realizes a theatrical production, and the efforts to do that, as documented in stage managers' reports, reveal the performance as a managed event. Well-managed performances seek a precision sufficient to maintain the production's integrity.

From this perspective, the best performances are not the ones that arouse the stage manager's attention and earn a page of furiously written notes. No, the best performances are the ones that leave the least trace in this vast archive, the performances for which the stage manager can just write:

On Performance Management, or Notes from the SM

dmiller(at)fas.harvard.edu
scholar.harvard.edu/dmiller
visualizingbroadway.com
@DerekKMiller