The easiest kind of stage is so simple that it can be made in a few minutes. You can use it for push puppets or rod puppets.
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| Use a comfortable chair to hide behind while your puppets peek over the sides and top. |
Put a table near the wall of the room, cover the front of it with a cloth reaching to the floor, so that nothing behind it can be seen, and the stage is ready for the show.
The audience sits in front of the table and the puppet theater manager, called the ''puppeteer,'' sits or kneels on the floor in back, unseen. He reaches up and move his push puppets or rod puppets as he speaks their lines.
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| This child is using a simple table for his hand-puppet theater. |
And here's a tip for you, the director: When puppets act, only the who is speaking moves. The others stall sill. In that way the audience is always sure which actor is talking.
To make a simple doorway stage, used for hand puppets or rod puppets, hang a short curtain so that it falls from the top of a doorway between two rooms. Leave a twenty or thirty inch opening. Then hang another curtain down to the floor.
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| Left, is the front of the stage and right is the back. This stage is made from a doorway. |
The audience sits in the room before the curtain while the puppeteer, behind the lower curtain, reaches up and works the actors in the opening. You can make the opening at the height that is most convenient for you.
You don't need an opening and closing curtain for such a stage. Just be sure that your actors go off at the right time, as they do in a real theater, instead of bobbing suddenly in the middle of a scene.
However, most audiences like the excitement of a curtain opening and closing, so you can make one very easily. Take two pieces of colored cloth, almost any kind, each a little longer and much wider than half the width of the stage opening. Sew rings about two or three inches apart along the top edge. Now run a wire through the rings and make it very tight with tasks on each side, right under the top curtain. You can open and close the curtains from behind by pulling the rings along the wire.
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| Bill's Theater is made from a cardboard box. |
This stage above, made from a box, should be in proportion to the size of the actors, so keep them in mind when you are making it. A puppet stage should be a little over two-and-one-half times the height of the actors. If a puppet is eight inches tall, the stage on which he plays should be about twenty inches high.
You can make stage curtains by cutting two pieces of cloth - each mush wider then one-half of your stage and a little longer than it is tall. Hem these, sew rings on the top edge, run a wire through the rings and stretch it tight across the top of the box stage. The curtains should come just to its floor, when finished. When you open and close these small curtains, be sure to keep your fingers up high, out of sight behind your big doorway curtain. Make it all seem like magic to your audience out front.
If you wish, you can place a fancy cardboard cutout across your stage, near the top, lettered with the name of your theater. You can make other additions, too. A chain of Christmas lights might make footlights, and lights around the outside of the stage. It is dramatic to dim them just before the performance begins!
