Not far from San Francisco, across the iconic Golden Gate Bridge, set beneath the redwoods of Northern California, you’ll find a small city called Mill Valley.
First, the site was home to the Coast Miwok, an Indigenous people who lived off the land and fished from its waters. Later, Spanish missionaries swept through with bibles and smallpox. Soon the promise of gold brought American settlers from the eastern territories, then during the Great Earthquake of 1906, San Franciscans fled north and decided to stay. Almost a century after that earthquake, Mill Valley became home to Emily Pathman.
She’s there now, having been living back at her parents’ house since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. The promising young stage manager was laid off from her job on the national tour of Bandstand and went back to her childhood home to await the return of her industry.
I’m talking to her, as I talk to almost everybody these days, on FaceTime. It’s a modern miracle, being able to video-call somebody on the other side of the country—a century ago, I’d have to hop on a train or correspond via post, if not pony. But luckily for me (and the ponies), I can hear her story from the comfort of my New York apartment.
“I started as a performer, onstage,” she says. “Acting, singing, dancing. And I was a performer for the majority of my childhood and high school years, and thought that was what I was going to do. I went to Interlochen [Arts Academy], I did pre-college at Carnegie Mellon, and I had stage managed two children’s theatre productions that, looking back, it was just like herding cats.”
Her high school drama department required their acting students to fulfill backstage duties; they could choose between crew, design, or stage management, and Emily chose the third option.
In her senior year, she found herself sitting down with her teachers, discussing college:
“I’d [stage managed] before and fell in love with it, but still was performing on stage as well. I was looking at musical theatre and acting conservatories and it was [at this meeting] that I said ‘you know what? I think I want to be a stage manager.’ I’d only really stage managed one show but I never looked back, and it was the best decision I ever made—because I truly love what I do.”
Stage managers are, by my definition, the unsung heroes of the theatre industry. Being the intermediary between all things creative and technical, the stage manager deserves respect—and, most of the time, a break. By Emily’s definition:
“The stage manager is like the hub of the wheel; they are the person responsible for making all of the facets of the production happen—you know, we’re the center of communication. And during a production, the stage manager is the one in charge of making sure all of the timing—of the lighting, the sound, the set moving, anything in that sense—is happening at the right time, based on what’s happening on stage. To make sure everything back stage, with the actors and the crew, is running smoothly and is as close to the way [it was] in tech and in rehearsals. Stuff changes from day to day depending on who’s in the show, who’s not in the show, what the theater limitations are—but it’s the job of the stage manager to make sure that [the show is] running as smoothly as possible.”
Her definition’s a little more precise than mine, but stage managers tend to be precise.
She admits that her analogy to the hub of the wheel, while apt, is not her own; she learned it from her teachers at Emerson College, where she earned a B.F.A in stage and production management.
“I loved my time at Emerson,” she tells me. “I chose Emerson for really two reasons, one reason being I just knew how phenomenal the program was. Looking at the alumni, and the connections the program builds. Also, I looked at schools in several different cities and I knew I wanted to leave California and go someplace else. Almost every school I was looking at was in a state where I had family—I’m very close with my family—but what made me curious about Boston was that I had never been there. It was very exciting to be somewhere that was totally new. Brand new experience. That was another reason Emerson was so intriguing: to be somewhere new.”
Her decision paid off almost immediately, in the form of a recurring summer job. The head of her department, Debra Acquavella, was also the resident production stage manager at the Contemporary American Theatre Festival in Shepardstown, West Virginia. Seeing promise in the freshman, Acquavella invited her to work at the festival—and Emily had a job every summer until graduating.
She left Emerson and went straight to work at Actors’ Theatre of Louisville, where she cultivated a passion for working on new plays; the theatre is known for its annual new play festival.
“With a new play,” she says, “you are going to start day one with one script and by the end of the week, or by tech, you’re going to have an entirely new show almost—because of the development through the rehearsal process with the actors and the playwright. Making changes on the fly is fun and hard work, and a little crazy sometimes. That really excites me—just, like, the development and being a part of that process. Being a part of the team that works well on new plays is fascinating. It’s a lot of hard work, but it’s very rewarding to see a play come from start to finish.”
Being able to roll with the punches and adjust quickly came in handy when Emily moved to New York the following year. She landed a job at Sleep No More, an immersive theatre experience in which actors perform an avant-garde adaptation of Macbeth, with elements of film noir and Hitchcock mixed in. The performance takes place in a six-floor building and audience members get to choose their own adventure, following characters and storylines from room to room. I ask her what it’s like to stage manage a production like that.
“It’s crazy! It’s like nothing I had ever done before. My first day of shows, I remember getting on the train—I’d been in New York maybe a month at this point, if that—and I don’t think I’d ever been exhausted like that in my entire life.
“Each floor has hundreds, if not thousands, of props that have to be set very specifically every day and it’s kind of like a treasure hunt when you come in the next day or between shows to figure out, ‘where did those things go? Where did audience members move the bottles, or the cup, or the shawl’—whatever it may be. Because there really are no limitations to what the audience can do. Obviously, the stage managers watch. And there are other people, the stewards, that try to direct people to different experiences, but it is definitely unlike anything I had ever done in terms of just how much there is to remember. I was there for six months. By my fourth month I was like, ‘I think I know what’s happening now!’ But it took a while.”
While figuring out the inner workings of Sleep No More took a a while, finding work after did not. Soon after she left the show, she was already onto her next project: the 20th anniversary tour of Rent—and only two years after graduating. It employed her for a year and a half and took her all over the country, even to select cities in Asia.
“We were in Tokyo for two weeks and toured seven different cities in China in nine weeks. It was insane but also amazing. And I would do it again. It was an experience unlike any—my company had never been there before and while they planned so much, there were new challenges every day.
“[The local crew] would go out at lunch and they might not come back because they work other jobs—and we’d have to find new people to load in the show…There were laws against having large trucks on the street in the middle of the day—it’s not allowed. So we would have to start load in at…I want to say 2 AM to 6 AM Like, dumping the trucks, and then we would all go home and sleep, and then come back again at 8…which is not what you normally do on tour.”
The process she’s referring to is one of the hardest jobs of a touring crew, even without added complications. Normally, after a production’s last performance in a city, the actors will leave the theatre and the crew will stay, dismantle the set, pack up the costumes, lights, and sound equipment, and load everything out onto trucks. They’ll go to sleep—oftentimes on a bus—and meet the set at the next city, where they’ll load everything into the next theater. Rinse and repeat for the length of the tour.
“I will say the audiences [in Asia] were unlike anywhere else. They truly loved the show. Like, on our closing night in Tokyo, I had finished my load out, it was 2 hours after the show came down…the actors were still in line signing autographs. The line went from the theatre to the train station, where we had to go to get back to our hotel.”
Emily’s strengths as a touring stage manager quickly led to her next and latest job: the first national tour of Bandstand…and that’s what she was working on when the pandemic hit.
“We started rehearsals in September,” she tells me. “We opened in November and we were supposed to run through mid-June. I will say, our last day on tour is probably something that will probably be ingrained in my memory forever. We had just come in from a day off, and at lunchtime we learned that [that night’s] show had been canceled. Then we found out that Friday was canceled, and whatever venue we were supposed to be at on Saturday was cancelled as well.
“Long story short, everything got canceled for about six days, and our producer came in to tell us ‘we’re gonna send you all home because that’s the safest plan at this point. So it’s a better plan to send everyone home and meet back in six days.’ And at the time we were expecting to come back. A lot of us thought maybe not in six days—we thought, ‘okay, we’ll be back in two and a half weeks. No problem.’ At least speaking for myself, I didn’t think we would cancel—I thought we’d come back at some point. So. Yeah.
“Thinking about that show now makes me sad. Because if I had known it was our last show…I wouldn’t have done anything differently, but there would probably have been parts I would have watched more, or tried to take photographs of moments in my mind more. But yeah, it was truly a very surreal experience.”
Emily went on unemployment in mid-March and her claim expired at the end of October. Luckily, she’s found some work. This past summer, she stage managed a couple of projects via Zoom—although she concedes that it’s a different medium with more technical difficulties. As for long-term non-theatrical employment, she’s been able to find full-time work as a nanny.
“It feels like tech 24/7. The kids just keep going; they never take a break,” she laughs.
I ask her about the industry and our colleagues’ employment status. She seems, like so many of us, to have taken some high-profile, unsolicited advice personally.
“I think they need to stop telling us to find something else to do. I can’t even put a number on how many people are in this boat right now, but we all spent years and dollars trying to get where we are. Yes, in the meantime, I found a different job as a nanny but this is not my career—this is just something to get me through until it comes back. Asking so many people to find something else to do is…honestly, it’s rude. Support us until we can come back.
“I know that theatre is going to come back. I hope that everyone knows that deep down—it will come back. It might be a year from now, but it’s not gonna go away. It’s not worth it to be scared for the whole time, thinking this won’t come back, because I truly don’t believe that. I don’t believe it at all. I don’t think that’s something to be afraid of.”
While the death of theatre isn’t something to be afraid of, the approaching “benefits cliff” is scary for a lot of people—about 12 million unemployed Americans will lose federal assistance in less than a month if Congress doesn’t pass another relief package.
For now, Emily’s glad to have found employment— but her productive, promising career is on hold for circumstances outside of her control, and it would seem that there’s no end in sight.
Still, the pride she has for her work shines through even a grainy FaceTime display. I mention that she’s wearing a black shirt—the backstage uniform of the stage manager. She laughs.
“I love what I do.”