French Scene Breakdown

A French scene is a unit of a play defined by who is on stage. Every entrance and every exit starts a new one. Break a script down that way and you stop calling thirty people to rehearse a scene for two.

This is where that breakdown lives, and it does the counting.

What it does that a blank spreadsheet doesn't

• Writes the call list. Tick who's on stage in each unit and the sheet returns the names as plain text — the comma-separated line that goes straight into the call email.
• Rolls up every actor. Units in, units playing, percentage of the show, first and last appearance.
• Finds the gaps. The longest run of units each actor sits out between their first entrance and their last exit. That's where a costume change fits, and where somebody can go home early.
• Builds the call. Type the first and last unit you plan to rehearse. It returns the exact roster, the page span, and the head count.
• Counts the sleeping bodies. A second mark for anyone on stage but not playing the scene — asleep, hidden, preset, standing in a tableau. Still an actor you have to call, and the sheet holds both facts at once.

What's included

• The spreadsheet: a blank breakdown with its own character rollup and call builder, plus a Start Here tab.
• Two filled-in examples, one of them with its own rollup and call builder so you can see the computed layer working on real data.
• A walkthrough document — how to mark a script on paper, where the judgment calls are, and what the file tells you that the script doesn't.

The worked examples

The Importance of Being Earnest, broken down whole: three acts, 37 units, nine characters. And Act III scene i of A Midsummer Night's Dream, which is the harder case — ensemble traffic, an interrupted rehearsal, and Titania asleep on stage for six of its eight units. Both scripts are public domain, so you can print either one and mark it up freely.

Room to work

80 units and 30 characters. That covers a full-length play at real granularity, including a musical with the songs split out as their own units.

Format

Google Sheets, with the walkthrough as a document. You'll need a Google account — not necessarily Gmail, and school and district accounts already qualify. Make a copy before you start typing and the blank stays blank for your next show. You can download it as an Excel file, though some of the functionality won't survive the trip.