To reiterate:
An At Rise Description tells us what we see when the lights come up or the curtain rises.
Stage Directions tell us how people behave, how they act, and what happens to them in a physical sense.
Entrances and Exits tell us where, when and in what way characters appear on the stage.
Stage directions tell us what people on a theatre stage do (and varieties of stage directions are used in TV drama and film scripts as well). In a short while, we will look at some examples of stage directions in practice. Before we do that, we will look more closely at how stage directions operate on the level of “telling” the story of a theatrical play or some other piece of drama.