I did theatre for four years in high school and it was easily one of best parts of school. I loved helping to put on a show for audiences to enjoy and that we could be proud of. It was stressful and demanding at times, but incredibly rewarding. 

I wasn’t an actor. I never had the confidence to perform in front of others like my classmates, so I joined tech crew instead; not the stars of the show, but still vital to ensuring the show unfolds in a proper way. I was a stagehand, responsible for moving set pieces on, off and around stage and managing the props the actors used. Without us, the show would fall apart, something I saw almost happen on occasion, thanks to mistakes made by tech. 

Despite my love and enjoyment for what I did for the shows I worked on, I never felt like anyone backstage received all the credit and attention for what we did. We stayed in the background, watching as others got it all instead. This is not just something that happened at my high school. At just about every theatre production I’ve ever seen, not once have backstage people gotten public praise for what they do. 

Backstage people never get the acknowledgment they deserve from the audience and even the rest of the production team. 

When you go to see a theatre performance, what happens at the end of the show? The cast comes back onstage in batches and takes turns bowing before doing a group bow, all to audience applause. The lighting and sound booth gets applause, as the actors indicate towards them for the audience. If it’s a musical, or there was musical accompaniment in general, the musicians in the pit receive applause as well. The actors bow together one final time before exiting the stage and the curtain falls once more. 

But this leaves nothing for the stagehands, hair/makeup people, costume organizers, and stage managers. They go unacknowledged by the production except in the playbill where their name is likely to get overlooked by the audience.  

Sometimes during shows, when the bows happened, I would commiserate with my fellow stagehands about how we never got to go onstage to get applause from the audience. It wouldn’t be that hard, right? We go onstage after the pit and booth got their acknowledgment and do our own bows together, before joining the actors in the final group bows. 

This isn’t to say that those backstage never get acknowledged for what they do. I personally can attest to the teacher in charge of my school’s drama club who directed the productions was very grateful for what the backstage tech people did. I even was going to be promoted to stage manager before COVID happened, and the actors were always very respectful of what we did and occasionally looked to us for guidance during shows. 

Maybe in other places, every member of the tech crew gets their due, but I’ve never seen it happen. It’s a shame because even though tech people aren’t the faces and features of a theatre show, they are the oil that keep the cogs in a production spinning smoothly. While those working the lights and sound get a moment at the end of the show, there are those who have to go without it because they are left waiting in the wings.