8. Julius Caesar, Act III, scene 2.

9.  In a long, high-vaulted room, looking out upon a Roman garden where the cypresses rise in narrowing shafts from thickets of oleander and myrtle, is seated a company of men and women, feasting.

WILLIAM SHARP:  The Lute-Player

10.  A room, half drawing-room, half study, in Lewis Davenant’s house in Rockminister.  Furniture eighteenth century, pictures, china in glass cases.  An April afternoon in 1860.

GEORGE MOORE:  Elizabeth Cooper

11.  An Island off the West of Ireland.  Cottage kitchen, with nets, oil-skins, spinning wheel, some new boards standing by the wall, etc.

J.M.  SYNGE:  Riders to the Sea

12.  Loud music.  After which the Scene is discovered, being a Laboratory or Alchemist’s work-house.  Vulcan looking at the registers, while a Cyclope, tending the fire, to the cornets began to sing.

BEN JONSON:  Mercury Vindicated

13.  Rather an awesome picture it is with the cold blue river and the great black cliffs and the blacker cypresses that grow along its banks.  There are signs of a trodden slope and a ferry, and there’s a rough old wooden shelter where passengers can wait; a bell hung on the top with which they call the ferryman.

CALTHROP AND BARKER:  The Harlequinade

Long before any play is produced there should be made a sketch or plan showing the stage settings.  If it is in color it will suggest the appearance of the actual stage.  One important point is to be noted.  Your sketch or model is merely a miniature of the real thing.  If you have a splotch of glaring color only an inch long it will appear in the full-size setting about two feet long.  A seemingly flat surface three by five inches in the design will come out six by ten feet behind the footlights.

Casting the Play.  When the play is selected, the roles must be cast.  To select the performers, one of many different methods may be followed.  The instructor of the class or the director of the production may assign parts to individuals.  When this person knows the requirements of the roles and the abilities of the members, this method always saves time and effort.  By placing all the responsibility upon one person it emphasizes care in choosing to secure best results.  At times a committee may do the casting.  Such a method prevents personal prejudice and immature judgments from operating.  It splits responsibility and requires more time than the first method.  It is an excellent method for seconding the opinions of a director who does not know very well the applicants for parts.  The third method is by “try-outs.”  In this the applicants show their ability.  This may be done by speaking or reciting before an audience, a committee, or the director.  It may consist of acting some role.  It may be the delivery of lines from the play to be acted.  It may be in a “cast reading” in which persons stand about the stage or room and read the lines of characters in the play.  If there are three or four applicants for one part, each is given a chance to act some scene.  In this manner all the roles are filled.