SM - Photocopying

My first practical experience as a stage manager suggests that the job is largely about photocopying.

I had two photocopying chores up front: to copy the auditions scenes (simple enough), and to create a rehearsal script.

Knowing it was fruitless, I visited Kinko's to see if they could transform the 5⅛ x 7¾, double-sided pages into full 8½ x 11 single-sided pages. No dice. Same thing at Staples, although there were nice enough to cut the binding off for me so I could do it myself at my work copier. (Employees can do b&w copies for only 2¢ per page.) It took some finagling -- and an email to our copier rental company -- to figure out the enlargement settings (let the copier do it for you automatically) and how to make it turn double-sided into single, but then it was smooth sailing. I stood by the copier, transferring each page from the copier onto a stack face-up, so that my pages were placed in reverse order.

My rehearsal script, with the lines numbered for easy reference.

With the pages in reverse order, I could punch holes on the right side of the page, so that in the binder, the script is on the left, leaving the back of the next page free for me to take notes on.

In The Back Stage Guide to Stage Management, Thomas Kelly mentions entering an entire script on a computer, so that SMs can take advantage of larger and smaller fonts to prepare cueing scripts (i.e., small fonts for when 3 pages go by with no cues; bigger fonts and more spacing to sections dense with cues; etc.). Great idea, but too time consuming for me. I did do some poking around in the sketchier parts of the Internet to see if I could find an existing electronic copy, but Dramatists Play Service and/or the Albee estate seem pretty diligent about crushing any pirated texts out there, and I stopped before my search imperiled by computer's operating system or the security of my credit cards.