Critique Your Stage Directions From the Director's Chair

Your script says she looks at him with the weight of thirty years behind her eyes. A director has to stage that on a Tuesday with two chairs and a lamp. This reads your directions the way a director does: what can be played, what nobody will see, and what you should hand over.

Read the scene below as a director staging it in a small venue with a fortnight of rehearsal and no budget.

Go through the stage directions and mark each one as playable, unplayable, invisible to the audience, or the director's job rather than the writer's. Playable means an actor can do it. Invisible means it describes something nobody past row three will see. The director's job means blocking and business you should hand over.

Then give the three directions most worth rewriting, with a replacement line for each, and name anything the script needs that is missing: entrances, exits, who is holding what, and where the scene is set.

Under 350 words, as a marked list then the three rewrites.

Scene: [paste the scene, including all stage directions]