There is a time in every director’s career when they become part of the audience for their own show.

For Sarah Altomari, that was Nov. 15, when she watched her six actors perform their roles in the way they workshopped them over months of rehearsing, which followed several months of preparation and visualization of the script by Altomari.

She said it was one of the more surreal experiences she has had in her eight years of involvement at Butler Little Theatre, all of which she had spent acting until directing “These Shining Lives” in 2024.

“When you get to the point where it’s like, ‘It’s time for me to shut up now,’ and you watch it happen, it’s an incredible feeling,” Altomari said.

Altomari was one of four people who made their directorial debuts during the theater’s 83rd season, which was a big leap in the ratio of new to old directors, according to Casey Bowser, one of the theater’s board members.

The theater recently announced the slate of five plays that will comprise its 85th season, which begins this year. The announcement also included a call for directors and producers for each.

Bowser said that although no one who does any work for Butler Little Theatre gets paid, it has many regular actors, directors and producers who work with the theater on up to several shows per season. However, the theater also hears out fresh faces who want to direct a show — it all depends on the vision they are pitching for a script.

“There’s always a combination of trying to find new people who are passionate with the people we’ve been relying on and trusting for years,” Bowser said. “If they are committed to the project and are able to give our audiences a show of quality, then we’ll take a little leap of faith and give them a shot.”

Other first-time directors at Butler Little Theatre last season include Laura Crago, who directed “The Star-Spangled Girl”; Andrew William Miller, who directed “Outside Mullingar”; and Allison Dalcamo, who codirected with Bowser “Exit Laughing.” Katie Moore directed the fourth show of the season, “Cry it Out,” which was her fourth time directing at the theater.

The upcoming productions are “Vino Veritas,” “Love Letters,” “The Holiday Channel Christmas Movie Wonderthon,” “Down Stairs” and “Hay Fever.”

Scripts for each season are chosen by a committee, and the board of directors at the theater also chooses a director for each one after meeting with candidates who express interest.

Moore said that while her first directing jobs at the theater came about by happenstance, those led to her developing a better vision as a director, which is a major deciding factor of how the board chooses a director for a show.

“I get ideas about how to market it, how to draw the actors together,” she said. “The moment I get a call to direct, I begin plotting it all out. I think of what I want to see.”

Crago said she felt compelled to apply to direct “The Star-Spangled Girl” mainly because she related to the script and the story it tells. Directing allowed Crago to put her creative stamp on the show — working with the actors, set designers and producer to bring what she saw in her head onto the stage.

“It was 20-somethings living in a big city, and I had lived in a big city. I lived in New York,” Crago said. “I’m a very visual person. You can take what the writer gives you and infuse your own creativity.”

Although “These Shining Lives” represented her first time directing, Altomari said she developed a sense of how to direct through the countless shows she has acted in, as well as a few shows she stage managed. Like Crago, Altomari said she connected to the play’s script, having been familiar with the real-life “radium girls.”

“Having spent those past eight years learning, I felt like I had enough knowledge and enough of a community of people around me I could bounce ideas off,” Altomari said. “I had a strong vision for what I wanted the actors to think about. I didn’t want to portray these women as victims, but as strong survivors who fought back at an oppressive system.”

Altomari said she smiled through the duration of “These Shining Lives” as she watched on opening night, not at the play’s subject matter, but at seeing the months of work pay off in front of an audience.

The script — which chronicles years of its characters’ lives encompassing labor, sickness, legal battles and death — is not an obvious choice for a first-time director. But Altomari said the script needed to keep the story’s momentum going through scenes that blend into one another, sometimes with the actors remaining on stage through a transition.

That challenge appealed to her.

“It’s not typical Scene 1, Scene 2; it’s complicated directing-wise, because you can’t have a lot of demarcation of scenes,” Altomari said. “You have to have the whole thing go smoothly with no brakes.”

Aside from making sure the actors know their lines, directors make sure the line readings reinforce the ideas behind a play. Moore said finding a way to show character traits and their relationships to one another is a fun part of the rehearsal process. Even the way an actor delivers a line is a choice a director makes, because actors can “probably do it 20 different ways.”

“I really like looking at the relationships that are in a play and going from there with the actors,” Moore said. “I try to develop the in-play relationship with them. We talk about that kind of context, because that forms what I want to see on stage. It plays into where they walk and when they walk.”

Crago said she floated the idea of using a puppet to play one of the three roles in “The Star-Spangled Girl,” because the actor initially cast in that role had to drop out early in rehearsals. While this puppet bit of casting didn’t come to pass because another live actor was cast in the part, this is the type of decision a director can make — if it comes down to it.

Bowser said that while it helps a prospective director to have a background in acting or stage managing, those experiences are not required for the Butler Little Theatre board to choose someone as a director.

He said people skills and time management are top of mind for the board when picking directors out of several candidates for a season.

“I think absolutely what a director needs, aside from the artistic parts, needs time management skills, needs to be good with people,” Bowser said. “The director’s role … it’s not a look-at-me position. It’s helping everyone foster a character, and be the person who puts it all together.”

Altomari also said the director ends up setting the “cast culture” of a show and making sure rehearsals run smoothly and efficiently. She said she spent weeks before rehearsals — even began plotting out blocking and ideas for characterizations — to make sure the cast could hit the ground running when rehearsals began.

Bowser said the theater’s producers and its board of directors support a director throughout the rehearsal period, especially for first-timers. In the end, though, it’s up to the actors to be prepared to deliver their performances to the audience.

“You have six weeks, and when it starts and you have that first audience, unless the wheels fall off, your job’s kind of done,” Bowser said. “You are handing the show over to our actors and trusting that they will be dedicated and respectful to everyone who spent the time.”

Crago said people who have an interest in directing, even if there is not a script this season that appeals to them, could get experience at the theater by working backstage. Then when a compelling script pops up, they can be ready to go for the director’s chair.

“Instead of maybe going straight to director, maybe help out backstage on a show with props,” Crago said. “Or be a stage manager, because stage manager is basically in charge of being at every rehearsal and writing down where they’re going in case they forget. They take notes but they also give lines. They call cues during a show.”

The deadline for director and producer applications for the theater’s 85th season is June 30. For more information, visit the theater’s website at butlerlittletheatre.com.