How to Budget for a Play

Video Transcript

"STEVE CAVERNO: Hi. My name is Steve Caverno on behalf of Expert Village, and today I'll be talking to you about playwriting basics. Now, we're going to talk about the almighty dollar and how this might factor in to influencing your creative aspirations. In this segment, we'll look at big and small budgets. Big budgets will feature lavish sets. You'll have a costume designer for the show and maybe have pyrotechnics, things exploding, and big scenic effects. In a small theater, you probably are going to have found items, stuff you find in a thrift store or something you borrowed from another theater company. The actors will be probably supplying their own costumes, and you probably won't even have a costume designer. The pyrotechnics, you'll probably have all the stuff happening offstage. If it's something, a building supposed to explode, you might be able to do that on Broadway. In a regional theater or in a community theater, you probably have to have people reacting to a large sound effect of an explosion offstage. And these are some of the ways in which budget can limit your creative output. J. M. Barrie probably had a pretty good idea that he'd be able to hoist child actors up on wires and create the illusion of them flying off to Never-Never Land when he pitched Peter Pan to his producer. Similarly, budget can affect what you want to put on stage. If you have the kind of budget he had and you have the kind of abilities that he had, you might consider having characters fly and writing stories about fairies and wizards and whatever you might want to write whereas if you're dealing with the more low scale budget, you might want to consider a more realistic idea."