Open Forum

Hello community! 

I am new here and I am also a new theater teacher. We will be performing a Play in April that requires a couch, an armchair, and a coffee table on the stage.

But here's the situation I have to work with. We share our space with our host church for our school. Therefore, we are not able to leave anything on the stage each day. In other words, we have to put the set up rehearse take the set down and do it all over again each day that we rehearse. Same goes for the show nights. I'm also not able to store any of the furniture at the church so something that can be disassembled is what I am aiming for. 

The space I'm working with is not large by any means. I've attached a picture of our stage with its dimensions. I'm trying to figure out how to make shift a couch that cast members can still sit on but as easily disassembled and reassembled. Same for the chair. There will be three walls that are part of the set as well. That will be taking up space on the stage. 

Any and all ideas on how to solve my furniture problem are welcome! 

For the sofa, I'm wondering if you could use part of a sectional, so the sections would already be set up to easily hook together or take apart.

Alternatively, I've seen people make benches by sticking together 3 armless chairs. If you were okay with a non-traditional kind of sofa (which you can put cushions/pillows on to make it more sofa-like), I suspect you could do this in an easily disassemblable way. Maybe buy a bucket of zip ties and zip tie the front and back legs together. Then you just have to cut the zip ties to have it broken down into 3 chairs again.

As for an arm chair, some recliners you can remove the back, so that at least gets it down to 2 pieces that would be easier to transport.

My only other idea was would the church have a sofa/chair they'd be willing to let you use, at least for rehearsal if not the actual show? I've rehearsed at a church before where they let us borrow furniture from other rooms of the church as long as we put it back after each rehearsal. You just have to remind the actors to be extra nice to the borrowed furniture :)