APR
27

Make an Actor Appear Onstage Out of Thin Air

By Mike Steele 

Mike Steele has been writing and directing as far back as he can remember.  He spent the bulk of his teenage years performing in school and community theatre productions and continued to act through college while he completed a BS in elementary education and sociology.  Mike directs school and community theatre productions and teaches cooperative drama workshops, a process in which he incorporates writing into the creative process.   

Do you have a magical character in your show?  A witch, an elf, maybe a fairy?  Want to dazzle the audience with a little spectacle?  Consider having the character make his or her grand entrance by appearing onstage as if out of thin air.  The effect is not as complicated to stage as you might think.

Do you have a magical character in your show?  A witch, an elf, maybe a fairy?  Want to dazzle the audience with a little spectacle?  Consider having the character make his or her grand entrance by appearing onstage as if out of thin air.  The effect is not as complicated to stage as you might think.

A few years ago, I co-wrote and directed a play, Murderous Night at the Museum, in which one of the characters was a magician.  When my students asked if the character could appear onstage in a magical puff of smoke, I said, “Sure!”  I thought the idea was just as exciting as they did, but then I had to figure out how to make it happen.

I worked with my set designer, and we came up with a plan...

We constructed the back wall of the set out of flats made of foam insulation sheets (standard muslin flats would also work for this method) with the exception of one panel that we made from spandex material stretched across wood framing.  We secured the spandex to the top, bottom, and one side of the wooden frame but left the other side unsecured.  Using spandex gave the illusion of a solid flat, but one end of the fabric could be stretched away from the frame to allow an actor to pass from one side of the flat to the other.  The spandex would then bounce back into place when released.  When we painted all of the flats the same color and lined them next to one another onstage, it was impossible to tell that one flat was unlike the others.

In order to conceal the entrance, we decided to use a platform about three feet high with a vented floor that would allow for a fog effect.  To incorporate the platform naturally into our set design, we dressed it to look like a cabinet.  We ensured that the platform could support the weight of a performer and cut a vent hole in the top of the cabinet — the platform floor — to which we fit a standard air conditioning grate.  This vent is ideal because it allows you to create a smoke/fog effect to conceal the actor’s entrance.  Directly behind the spandex flat, we built another platform to match the height of the first so that the actor would be entering from backstage at the same level.

During performances, the illusion functioned like this...

The actor playing the magician waited backstage on the platform until it was time to make his magical entrance.  Meanwhile, a stagehand was underneath the onstage platform, concealed by the cabinet doors, to operate the fog machine.  On the entrance cue, the stagehand shot a short blast of heavy fog through the vent to mask the actor’s entrance.  The actor quickly stretched the spandex away from the frame and stepped through the opening.  Once the “smoke” cleared, the actor was onstage atop the “cabinet,” and the spandex flat appeared as normal.  It was as if our magician had appeared out of thin air!

I was fortunate to have a master set designer who helped concoct the idea.  He was willing to build and then rebuild portions of the structure until the effect worked smoothly.  Of course, you could create a similar effect without using platforms onstage and backstage.  In fact, you can mimic aspects of the effect easily at very little cost with even the simplest tech capabilities.

Only two things are required for this effect:  1) something for the actor to hide behind and 2) some way to divert the audience’s attention so the actor can slip onstage unnoticed.  Remember, distraction is any magician’s best trick.  So maybe the actor makes his entrance from behind a couch or from the offstage side of a doorway or from behind a large foam rock or simply from the wings.  Maybe you still use the spandex opening on one edge of a flat, and your actor pops in during a strobe light effect or a quick black light effect.  You can even find inexpensive kits designed to produce one-time puffs of smoke in online special effects shops.  Add a magical sound cue into the mix, and you’ve got an added audience distraction.  You can adapt similar concepts to make objects (instead of actors) appear or to make actors or objects disappear.

Brainstorm your own ideas for how to make an actor appear out of thin air.  You don’t have to get fancy — the audience knows it’s just a trick, after all.  Still, even the simplest illusions can be a lot of fun for both the actors and the audience.  And forget Penn & Teller’s Vegas-sized budget to add a bit of magic to your show.  Just use a little creativity with where the actor hides until appearing and what you use to distract the audience, and have fun!

(Editor’s note:  This article aims to suggest ways to perform this effect without the use of incendiary devices.  We strongly advise that the use of any pyrotechnics should be cleared by both your theatre or school administration and the local fire department.)