# Stage Directions Explained: Upstage, Downstage, Cheating Out, and What the Director Means > Whose left is stage left, why upstage is called upstage, the nine areas of the stage, and the rehearsal-room notes nobody explains: cheat out, counter, open up, and "you are upstaging yourself." - URL: https://www.offbook.com/blog/stage-directions-explained - Published: 2026-10-16 - Last updated: 2026-10-16 The director is in row F with a coffee and a notepad. "Can you take that down left, cheat out a little, and then counter when she crosses?" Everyone else moves. You stand still for half a second too long, trying to work out whose left she means. Nobody hands you a glossary on the first day. Stage directions are a working language that actors pick up by getting them wrong in front of people, and the words that confuse you most are rarely the ones on a classroom worksheet. "Downstage" is easy to look up. "You're upstaging yourself" is not. The short version: every direction is named from your point of view, standing on stage and facing the audience. Downstage is toward the audience, upstage is away from it, and the floor is a grid of nine areas. Then there's a second layer, the notes directors give about how you stand and move: cheat out, open up, counter, share the scene. Learn both and you'll stop translating in your head. ## Start with whose left it is Stage left is your left as you stand on stage looking out at the house. Stage right is your right. From the audience, those are reversed, which is why there's a separate pair of words, house left and house right, for the audience's point of view. A director sitting in the house has to flip everything when they talk to you, and good ones do it without thinking. When a note is ambiguous ("go left"), it's fine to ask "stage left?" It takes two seconds and saves a wrong cross. Stage managers ask it too, and nobody thinks less of them. A trick for drilling it: stand in your kitchen facing the room as if it were the audience, then have someone call out directions while you move without pausing. Your body has to learn this, not your head, because in rehearsal there's no time to stop and reason it out. ## Why upstage is called upstage The words come from a time when stages were built on a slope. The [TDF Theatre Dictionary](https://tdf.org/on-stage/theatre-dictionary/search-by-letter/upstagedownstage) explains that upstage and downstage come from raked stages, which tilt upward from the front row toward the back. Walking away from the audience was literally walking uphill. Some theaters still have raked stages. The word is older than most people guess. [Etymonline](https://www.etymonline.com/word/upstage) dates "upstage" in theater jargon to 1855, meaning the rear of the stage. The verb, "to upstage" someone, came much later, in 1921, and it comes straight from the physical move: if you drift upstage of a scene partner, they have to turn away from the audience to talk to you. That's still the core of the problem, and it's why directors care. The actor upstage keeps their face to the house; the one who turns to face them shows the audience their back. ## Learn the nine areas of the stage Directors and stage managers divide a proscenium stage into a grid. [Backstage's guide to stage positions](https://www.backstage.com/magazine/article/main-theater-stage-positions-77893/) describes it as three sections wide and three deep, with upstage the third farthest from the audience. Downstage is the third nearest the edge, center is the middle, and combining the two gives you nine names. - **Upstage right, upstage center, upstage left** (USR, USC, USL) make up the back row, furthest from the audience. - **Stage right, center stage, stage left** (SR, C, SL) make up the middle row. - **Downstage right, downstage center, downstage left** (DSR, DSC, DSL) make up the front row, nearest the audience. - Some directors and books drop the "stage" and say "down left" or "up right." It means the same thing. - Off left and off right mean in the wings, out of the audience's sight, which is where entrances and exits start and end. The grid matters most when you're writing blocking in your script, because the abbreviations are short enough to fit in a margin. Our guide to [remembering your blocking](https://www.offbook.com/blog/how-to-memorize-blocking) covers the shorthand and how to mark a page so you can still read it in tech week. ### On a thrust or in the round The grid assumes the audience sits on one side. On a thrust stage, with seats on three sides, or in the round, "downstage" gets fuzzy, and some companies switch to a clock face or to landmarks ("toward the vom," "the aisle by the door"). If the rehearsal room uses its own system, write its key on the inside cover of your script on day one. ## The notes about how you stand Once you're in the right place, the director will start giving notes about which way you face. These come from a set of body positions, described in a [Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute unit on body position](https://teachersinstitute.yale.edu/curriculum/units/1983/5/83.05.07/2) as five turns from facing the audience to facing away: - **Full front** means facing the audience directly. - **One-quarter** means turned about halfway between full front and profile, the usual way two actors share a scene while staying visible. - **Profile** means facing straight stage left or stage right, so the audience sees one side of you. - **Three-quarter** means turned mostly away, which hands the moment to a partner who is upstage of you. - **Full back** means your back is to the house. "Open up" means turn toward full front. "You're closed off" means you've turned too far upstage, and the audience is looking at your shoulder. Neither is a criticism of your acting. It's a note about sightlines, the line from a seat in the house to your face. ### Cheat out This one confuses new actors, because it sounds like you're doing something wrong. The [Theatrecrafts directing glossary](https://theatrecrafts.com/pages/?p=1080) explains it plainly: when you're turned too far upstage, the director may ask you to turn slightly toward the audience. "Out" means toward the house, and "cheat" means improving the sightline without making the position look unnatural. In practice, cheating out often means keeping your feet and hips in one-quarter while your eyes find your partner. Real people talk face to face; stage people talk at a slight angle that still reads as face to face from row F. Your scene partner may cheat too, so you meet in the middle. The mistake is overdoing it. If you swing full front and deliver your line to the balcony while your partner is beside you, the scene stops looking like two people talking. Cheat a few degrees, check with the director, and keep listening to your partner with your whole body. ## Moving with other people: crosses, counters, and upstaging A **cross** is any move from one place to another. Directors often want it on a specific word or beat, and they may say which way to pass another actor: "cross below him" means between him and the audience, and "cross above" means behind him. Which one is polite? The Yale unit's advice: cross in front of another actor only on your own lines, or during a pause in the action. Crossing below someone while they're talking pulls the audience's eye off them and onto you. A **counter**, or counter-cross, is the move that answers someone else's cross. The [American Association of Community Theatre glossary](https://aact.org/theatre-terms-view/c?page=5) defines it as crossing in the opposite direction to another actor to keep the stage picture balanced, when the sense of the scene allows it. If your partner crosses toward you and you stay put, the two of you end up bunched on one side; a small counter the other way keeps the picture open. ### "You're upstaging yourself" [Backstage defines upstaging](https://www.backstage.com/magazine/article/upstaging-49698/) as standing further upstage than your fellow actors, so they have to turn away from the audience. Doing it to someone else is a famous bad habit. Doing it to yourself is less noticed: you drift downstage of the person you're talking to, then turn upstage to face them, and now it's your face the audience can't see. The fix is to stay level with your partner, unless the director has staged one of you upstage on purpose. When someone else has the big moment, a turn to three-quarter toward them gives it to them without a word. ## Turn written directions into moves Scripts have their own stage directions, the italic text between speeches: "crosses to the window," "sits," "exit left." Directors often treat them as a starting point, not a rule. The director blocks the scene for this set and this cast, and the blocking you're given replaces whatever the printed text says. Here's a short exchange from *The Importance of Being Earnest*, from the public-domain [Standard Ebooks text](https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/oscar-wilde/the-importance-of-being-earnest). The bracketed notes are an invented example of blocking for one production, written in the grid's shorthand: > **Lady Bracknell:** [X to armchair DSL, sits, cheats out] You can take a seat, Mr. Worthing. > > **Jack:** [X DSR, stays standing, one-quarter] Thank you, Lady Bracknell, I prefer standing. Read the notes and the scene opens up. She sits down left and he crosses down right, so they end up level across the stage and neither has to turn upstage to talk to the other. Both angle toward the house, so the audience sees two faces during the interrogation. And he stays on his feet while she sits, which plays his nerves. Every abbreviation does a job. When you rehearse at home, run the stage directions with the dialogue, not as an afterthought. In Offbook you can edit the stage directions in a scene and add custom pauses before a line, so there's room to make your cross or sit before the next cue arrives. The video below shows the stage direction settings. For practice scenes, browse our [public-domain play library](https://www.offbook.com/plays), or rehearse a classic scene with our [free run lines tool](https://www.offbook.com/tools/run-lines-online). Video: [Stage directions](https://www.offbook.com/learn/stage-directions) (0:53) ## How to keep up in the room The vocabulary is the easy part. The hard part is hearing a note, translating it, and doing it before the director moves on. A few habits help: - Write the note in your script immediately, in pencil, next to the word where the move happens. - Repeat a complicated note back once: "Down left on *seat*, then cheat out." It catches mistakes before they're rehearsed in. - If you don't know a term, ask right then. Directors would much rather explain "counter" once than fix a wrong move for a week. - Watch where the other actors go. Their crosses are often your cue to counter. - Walk the scene at home before the next rehearsal, saying the lines aloud as you hit each area. Directors also differ. Some give precise grid positions; others say "find your way over there on this line" and let you discover it. Both are normal. Our guide to [taking direction](https://www.offbook.com/blog/how-to-take-direction) covers how to make a note your own instead of just obeying it. ## Questions actors ask ### Is stage left my left or the audience's left? Yours, as you stand on stage facing the audience. The audience's left is called house left, and it's on your right. If a note could mean either, ask which. ### What does "cheat out" mean in theater? Turn slightly toward the audience so they can see your face, while still playing to your scene partner. It usually means a few degrees, not a full turn to face front. ### Why is upstage called upstage? Older stages sloped upward away from the audience, so the back of the stage was literally higher. The term stuck even though flat stages are now common. ### Is upstaging someone always bad? Not when the director stages it. A director may place a character upstage on purpose to give them the scene. It's a problem when an actor drifts there on their own and forces a partner to turn away from the audience. ### Do film sets use stage directions? Not usually the grid. On set you may hear camera left and camera right instead, and your marks are often taped on the floor. Cheating still exists, though: you may be asked to cheat toward the lens.