A playboard is the horizontal shelf a stage puppeteer works above, marking the level at which the puppet appears to stand and hiding the performer beneath it.
What it does
It sets the puppet’s floor. A hand puppetA hand puppet is worn directly on the hand, with the perform... resting its arms on the playboard reads as leaning on a wall or a counter. A puppet dropping below it has left the stage. Everything the audience understands about where the character is comes from that line.
Height is the whole design decision
Too high and performers hold their arms overhead for the entire show, which is exhausting and degrades the performance. Too low and the audience sees over it. It gets set from the sightline of the furthest and highest seat in the house, then checked against how long the performers can actually sustain it.
Sitting or standing
A standing playboard is roughly head height for the performers. A seated setup puts it lower and is far kinder on a long run, at the cost of mobility.
The masking below
is as important as the board itself. Dark fabricFabric is the outer surface of a puppet — the skin, the cl... More, no gaps, and nothing reflective. Audiences forgive a lot but a glimpse of a performer’s face breaks the illusion in a way that is hard to recover from.
Modern staging often skips it
Contemporary and tabletop work frequently abandons the playboard entirely and lets the audience see the puppeteers, on the reasoning that they stop noticing within a minute. Both approaches are current practice.
The hack: rehearse at performance height from the first day. BlockingBlocking is the planned movement and positioning of puppets ... worked out at a comfortable height falls apart when your arms are actually up, and it is the arms that run out first.