Low Budget Sets For Your Low Budget Plays

Many playwrights and directors like their plays to be as realistic looking as possible. Writers who grew up watching movies and television forget that a stage play is different and requires effort and planning when designing a set. A stage play rarely has the same resources and budget available that a Hollywood film has. Therefore, it is necessary that everyone have the same vision and goals prior to beginning a project.

Traditional stage sets involve scenery painted on wood and canvas flats. Some sets are more complex with detailed structures on various levels. One famous play has an elaborate set that shows the stage from the front in one-act and from the back side in the second act. And one play involves a real helicopter landing on the stage.

Those spectacular effects are fun and they can bring in crowds of people willing to pay big bucks for tickets. But they also cost staggering amounts of money to create. Your local church or school auditorium probably does not have a big enough hole in the roof to let a hovering helicopter in any way. For community theater it's better if everyone puts their creative minds to work thinking of ways to do more with less.

In a stage play the sets just have to suggest the location and maybe the mood of the scene. A single table and chair can be a cafe. The same table and a few more chairs can be a dining room, the scene of a poker game, an office or the cock pit of a time travel machine.

You can use indoor privacy screens for walls. You see them in old movies a lot, those things that have several panels that fold like an accordion. They are easy to move, you can hang pictures and other significant items on them and you can have different scenery on the front and back sides. You don't even need real furniture. Amazing things can be done with sturdy wooden boxes. They can be arranged and stacked to represent chairs, tables, cars, beds, Doric columns or castle ramparts.

One clever set designer stacked and secured large appliance boxes on top of each other. She then painted a different bit of scenery on each of the four sides. A member of the cast or crew just had to turn the boxes around to show the audience whether they were in the castle, the forest, the cottage or the witch's house.

A recent production used one very large wooden box to represent the hospital bed, the mountain, the desk and the row of sinks in the men's room where the men washed their hands. The only other set pieces were two chairs that stood beside the bed or the desk or became the waiting room. The audience had no trouble knowing where the action was taking place because the action and the dialogue told them.

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