No, not those pesky things written in italics in your script. Though I should write about them as well. I mean when your director says "Move upstage" or "Cross to right stage" and you look at him with that deer-in-the-spotlight look because....you don't know where to go!
No problem, gentle readers. I'm here to help.
As we can see by our handy-dandy illustration....this can be confusing. The first rule to remember is: Directions are to be followed from the point of view from the actor onstage. So when you're onstage and your director tells you to walk to stage right, you walk towards YOUR right. (That's the hand that doesn't make the L when you hold them up.) Nevermind what the audience would think. This is all about you, baby!
Now we come to that upstage/downstage thing. This is where it gets interesting. "Back in the day" y'know the 17th and 18th Centuries....maybe B.C..... stages were actually tilted down towards the audiences. That way the chorus people in the back could still be seen. They weren't tilted much, maybe only a grade of a few inches. But it helped! So nowadays when we say "upstage" we mean the back of the stage, which was "up" from the front! Likewise, "downstage" means the front of the stage, or the part that is lowest.
Make sense?
No?
Maybe you should gift yourself this t-shirt then, for help:
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