Nobody asked, but here it is.

Unless otherwise masked, scene changes are horrible and should be avoided at all costs unless absolutely necessary. They kill any momentum you've gathered in your play, and they turn your performance from a potentially enjoyable story into a chore for the audience to sit through.

I know what you're thinking - "but I have to have scene changes!" And that's not wrong, they're an integral part of most plays. And if you have a humongous setting shift, for example, going from the Darling Nursery to Neverland... then yeah, you can't not do that scene change. There are some situations where it's acceptable or necessary, and as long as it only happens once or twice in your two hour play, and the changes take no more than one or two minutes, you're probably okay. Or if your scene changes happens during a musical number and you can keep things happening, that actually works really well. But audiences have a limited attention span, and any more interruption than that is going to make them check out. And when your audience checks out, that's when you know you've lost. If your audience members are sitting there staring at the ceiling, counting the seconds on their watch, or worse using their phones, that's a surefire sign that for some reason or another, they'd rather go home than sit through the rest of your play. Scene changes aren't the only thing that causes this, but I think it's crucial for all theatre practitioners to be more aware of things they do that cause the audience "check-out". I've seen this happen a lot as an actor too - times where I try to make eye contact while I should be the point of focus, and audience members aren't even looking at me because they don't care about the show. Or maybe I just suck, that's a possibility too.

Anyway, some other things that cause audience disengagement are actors forgetting lines, messing up, otherwise stalling, poor writing, or long costume changes. Scene changes are, in my opinion, one of the easiest things in this list to get right and can give you the biggest improvement for minimal effort. College, high school, and community theatres - especially those on really low budgets - can be very prone to adding lots of scene changes to their scripts, and insisting on doing them. And please, please, please if your set is just a bunch of furniture like chairs or tables, don't even bother moving it around the stage. It doesn't matter. There are many ways to show an audience you're in a different location than the last scene, so get creative and find a way to convey that information without stalling your performance for two minutes while the audience sits there and waits. Too many strikes, and you're out. Besides, using things like chairs and tables to communicate locations other than maybe a dining room is a bit of a stretch anyway so don't even bother. Audiences are smarter than you think and they don't need to be told everything.

So what should we do about scene changes?

1. Authors should be more aware of how many scene changes they're baking into a script when they write it - especially for one-acts or shorts. It's very easy to overlook these details that significantly affect a production while you're just typing it out. Any play less than 15 minutes should never have a physical scene change, and if it must happen, the author should try to provide a way to mask it or make it easier to play off. Shorts and one-acts should very rarely have a complicated set in the first place anyway. Longer plays can get a pass on this as long as they either don't have too many changes, or they are masked using musical numbers or other scenes.

2. Scenic Designers shouldn't be designing unnecessary sets. Let the audience use their imagination. Do your best to work with the director to come up with a vision that can work for as many scenes of the play as possible so you don't burn time on moving stuff that doesn't truly need to be moved.

3. Scene changes themselves should be very carefully choreographed and thoroughly practiced when running the show in rehearsal. Please get a stagehand or two for this, because asking actors to do this is often unreliable because they have many other things to remember to do in the first place.

4. The Director should help move things along, and they may need to get creative. After all, it's ultimately up to them to keep the show flowing. A good director should be able to acknowledge when the pacing dies, scene change or not, and they should address the problem with their team. That's kinda their job, isn't it? I don't see anything wrong with a director intervening in a scenic design that calls for too many or too complicated scene changes, or adjusting staging elements to better account for an unthoughtful script.

So yeah, that's it. I despise scene changes, even when they're necessary to tell the story. Just don't do them, and don't do shows that need them, because they will absolutely ruin the rest of an otherwise decent show by creating so much lag and boredom for your audience. I say we bring back the Neoclassical Unities... can we call it Neoneoclassicalism?