How to Learn Your Entrances and Exits (So You Never Miss One)

You’re standing in the wings, a little to the left of where the spike tape says you should be. The scene on stage sounds like it’s under water. Someone laughs. There’s a pause. Was that your cue? You know your lines cold, but right now you’d trade all of them for one honest answer to that question.

Plenty of actors have had that moment, and the dream version is famous, the one where the stage is empty and you’re still in the dressing room looking for your shoes. A missed entrance feels worse than a dropped line, because a dropped line happens to you in front of everyone, and a missed entrance happens to your scene partner while you’re not there.

The short version: treat every entrance as a line you have to learn. Make an entrance sheet with each cue and the half page before it, learn the stretch before each entrance well enough to follow it from the wings, and know the moment you start walking as well as the moment you arrive. Listen to the scene, not the people around you. Learn your exits the same way, because where you go next is usually another entrance.

Know that your entrance is your job

Don’t count on anyone telling you when to go on. Southern Illinois University’s theater production handbook puts it in the agreement every actor signs: even though places will be called, “you alone are responsible for all of your entrance cues.” In rehearsal, the same handbook says, the stage manager calls only the beginning of acts and scenes.

Calls like “five minutes” and “places” get you to the right part of the building. Beyond that, the help you get varies. The same handbook asks the assistant stage manager to warn actors of entrances during a show, and some theaters pipe the show into the dressing rooms over speakers. Treat all of it as a warning system. The cue itself is yours.

Some shows use a cue light for certain entrances. According to the standard description of theatrical cues, cue lights are used when a headset isn’t practical, such as when an actor needs to make an entrance. A solid red light usually means warning, a flashing red or yellow light means standby, and green means go. If your show uses one, ask the stage manager which of your entrances it covers. Then learn the cue anyway, in case the bulb goes.

For the rest of the pre-show routine, from answering “Thank you, five” to where to be at half hour, our guide on working with your stage manager covers the calls. This article is about the part that comes after places.

Make an entrance sheet before you’re off book

Some stage managers keep a chart of who enters and exits where. The SIU handbook lists an “Entrance and Exit Chart” as part of the prompt script. Make your own version for your part, early, while you’re still learning lines. It doesn’t take long, and it saves a lot of guessing later.

Go through the script once, only looking for the moments you arrive and leave. For each one, write down:

• The cue. The exact last words, sound, or action before you’re seen. Write the words out in full, not “after Prism’s line.”
• The warning. A line about half a page earlier that tells you to stop chatting and get to your spot.
• Your go. The line where you start moving, if it comes before the cue (settle it in rehearsal).
• The side and the door. Stage left or right, upstage or down, which door or gap in the set.
• What you carry and wear. A prop, a coat, a change of shoes, anything that has to be in your hands when you go.
• Your first line, or your first action. Sometimes you say nothing for a while after you walk on.
• Your exit. The line you leave on, the side you leave by, and where you go next.

If you’ve been marking your script with ENT and EX already, our guide to marking up your script for memorizing shows a shorthand that fits on the page. The entrance sheet pulls all of those marks onto one list you can pin up in the dressing room.

Learn the lines before your entrance, too

You probably learn your cues as the last few words before each line. Entrances need more than that. You’re offstage, the sound is muffled, and the cue line might be thrown away by an actor facing upstage. If the only thing you know is the last four words, one dropped word means you never hear your cue.

So learn the stretch of scene before every entrance well enough to follow it from the wings. You don’t need it word-perfect. You need to know where you are in it, so that if a line gets cut or paraphrased, you still know your cue is two speeches away. Our guide on picking up cues covers drilling the last words of a line; this is the same idea with a longer runway.

Here’s a famous entrance from Act II of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest. Miss Prism and Dr. Chasuble are talking in the garden. Jack is about to arrive, dressed in mourning for a brother who doesn’t exist. The text is exactly as it appears in the Project Gutenberg edition.

MISS PRISM. That depends on the intellectual sympathies of the woman. Maturity can always be depended on. Ripeness can be trusted. Young women are green. [Dr. Chasuble starts.] I spoke horticulturally. My metaphor was drawn from fruits. But where is Cecily?

CHASUBLE. Perhaps she followed us to the schools.

[Enter Jack slowly from the back of the garden. He is dressed in the deepest mourning, with crape hatband and black gloves.]

MISS PRISM. Mr. Worthing!

CHASUBLE. Mr. Worthing?

MISS PRISM. This is indeed a surprise. We did not look for you till Monday afternoon.

JACK. [Shakes Miss Prism’s hand in a tragic manner.] I have returned sooner than I expected. Dr. Chasuble, I hope you are well?

Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest, Act II (Project Gutenberg)

On the page, Jack’s cue is “Perhaps she followed us to the schools.” But Wilde says Jack enters slowly from the back of the garden, and Miss Prism has to see him to say “Mr. Worthing!” On many sets, Jack may already be moving before Chasuble finishes. His real go might be “But where is Cecily?” or even “My metaphor was drawn from fruits.” That depends on the set and the director, which is why you settle it in rehearsal and write it on your sheet.

Notice, too, that Jack walks on and says nothing through three speeches. If he only learned his lines, he’d know “I have returned sooner than I expected” perfectly and have no idea when to start walking. A lot of entrances work like this: the action comes first, and the line comes later.

Listen for the cue, not for the people around you

Remembering to walk on at the right moment is a different memory task from remembering a line. Psychologists call it prospective memory: remembering to do something later, when the moment comes. A Washington University article about the book Mark McDaniel wrote with Gilles Einstein describes how intentions get lost once we’re distracted; McDaniel points out that in daily life nobody prompts you, so your own memory has to start the retrieval.

The research has a useful detail. In a 2015 review in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, McDaniel and colleagues cite a lab study (Scullin and colleagues, 2010) that found high success when the task people were doing made them process the cue itself, a “focal” cue, and very low success when it didn’t. These were lab tasks, not actors in the wings. But the lesson carries: if you’re following the scene, your cue is in the middle of your attention. If you’re chatting, checking your phone, or running your own next speech, it’s no longer part of what you’re processing.

Stories from the wings make the same point. In a 2016 Playbill column, Seth Rudetsky tells of Roger Bart, waiting in the wings of Big River with a castmate, suddenly making a move toward the stage, as if their chat had made them almost miss their entrance. Bart stopped. The castmate kept going, straight into the wrong scene. Rudetsky calls Bart a prankster, but the lesson is real: take your cue from the play, never from another actor moving.

The same column has a second warning. Adam Pascal forgot an entrance during a song in Disaster!, and his reaction carried from offstage, because his mic was on. If you wear a mic, assume it’s live from the moment you leave the dressing room.

So when your warning line comes, stop talking and go to your spot. Face the stage if you can. Keep your focus on the scene until you’re on.

Rehearse the walk, not just the words

Entrances take time. Some are three steps through a door; some are a run around the back of the set and up a ramp. Count yours. If it takes eight seconds to reach the light from your spot, you need to leave eight seconds before you’d like to arrive, and that moment needs its own cue on your sheet.

When you can, rehearse the entrance from the real place. You might expect that to help simply because memory is tied to where you learned something, and there’s research on that. A classic 1975 study by Godden and Baddeley found that divers recalled words better in the setting where they’d learned them, on land or underwater. But a 2021 replication in Royal Society Open Science didn’t find that advantage, and notes that the effect in other studies tends to be modest.

So rehearse in the space for the practical reasons, like learning the distance, the dark, and the sound, and don’t count on the room to remind you. Know your cues well enough to follow the scene from anywhere, including a dressing room speaker on a bad night.

At home, run the scene through each entrance. Offbook is a good way to do that alone. Upload the script, pick your role, and realistic voices read every other character, then wait for your line. In the scene editor, add a pause before the first line after your entrance, so the time you need to walk on is built into the run, and set how fast your scene partners talk to match the pace in the room.

For the moment you cross into the light, our guide to the moment before covers what your character was doing a second earlier and how to walk in already alive. Getting there on time is this guide’s job; arriving as someone is that one’s.

Learn your exits as carefully as your entrances

Exits get less attention because the scene seems to be over for you. It isn’t. You’re acting until you’re out of the audience’s sight, and the next thing you do offstage is often what makes your next entrance possible. Learn three things for every exit: the line you leave on, the side you leave by, and where you go next.

That last one matters most. If you exit stage left and re-enter stage right in two pages, you need to know the crossover route and how long it takes. If there’s a quick change in between, you need to know where your dresser is waiting. Write it on your entrance sheet in the same row as the exit.

In tech, the SIU handbook asks stage managers to tell actors not to leave immediately after an exit, but to wait several minutes in the wings, because a cue may have to be repeated. That’s a good habit in every tech. If you’ve already wandered to the green room, our guide on tech week for actors explains why the whole room ends up waiting for you.

Drill your entrances away from the theater

Once you have your sheet, run your entrances as their own drill. It takes a fraction of the time a full run does.

• Read the warning line out loud, run up to your cue in your head, and say your cue line. Then name the side, the prop, and your first line or action, and take the step.
• Do the same for each exit: say your exit line, then name where you go next.
• Shuffle the order once you know them, so you can find any entrance without starting from the top of the act.

Listening helps with the lead-in stretches, since that’s what you’ll be doing in the wings. Offbook’s listen mode plays a whole scene aloud, including your lines, and you can listen to your scenes on your phone anywhere: on the bus, before half hour, or walking to the theater. Try picking out each warning line and each cue as it goes by.

If an entrance comes with a speech you’re shaky on, our free first-letter line memorizer turns any passage into first-letter cues, which is a quick way to check the opening is solid. Our play library shows how big every role is in plays by Shakespeare, Wilde, Chekhov and more, if you want a script to try the drill on.

What to do if you miss an entrance

If it happens, go as soon as you realize. Don’t stop to fix your costume or run the line in your head. Get on as quickly as you safely can, in character, and join the scene where it is, not where it should have been.

Your scene partners will likely have been filling the gap, and they may have jumped ahead, cut a line, or repeated one. Listen for where they’ve landed and pick up from there. Our guide on what to do when something goes wrong on stage covers the other side of this moment, from the actor left waiting.

Afterward, tell the stage manager what happened and apologize to the actors who covered for you. Then find out why. Missed the warning? Couldn’t hear the cue? Chatting? Each one has a fix, and it usually goes on your entrance sheet that night.

Questions actors ask

How do actors know when to go on stage?

They learn the cue, usually the last line or sound before their entrance, and follow the scene from the wings or a dressing room speaker. The stage manager calls places and may warn actors before entrances, and some theaters use cue lights, but the actor is expected to know each cue.

Does the stage manager call every entrance?

Not always. Stage managers call places before the show and may give warnings along the way, but they may not call every entrance. Some programs, like SIU’s, put it in writing that each entrance is your responsibility.

How early should I be in the wings before an entrance?

Early enough to hear your warning line from your spot, settle, and follow the scene for at least half a page. If you’re not sure, ask your stage manager where they’d like you to wait.

What if I can’t hear my cue from offstage?

Tell the stage manager during tech, when it’s easiest to fix. They may suggest a better place to wait, a visual cue such as a light change, or a cue light. Meanwhile, learn the lines before your entrance so you can follow the scene even if one line goes missing.