American Theatre Wing, the organization best known as the founder of the Tony Awards, has an ongoing feature called “In the Wings“. It’s a series of short videos which highlight people in different backstage roles. The latest video highlights a prop master.
Desiree Maurer is the prop master at Playwrights Horizon here in New York City. Incidentally, she had my position as Assistant Props Master at the Public Theater before that.
The video series are a great look on all the different aspects of what goes into making a theatre run. I also suggest checking out the one on Ruth Sternberg, production manager. Ruth is our production manager at the Public, and the video shows a lot of clips from shows I’ve worked on there. You can also catch a brief cameo of me in this video when she is checking out the bird puppets for Winter’s Tale.
Martha Donaldson is a frequent stage manager here as well, and in the “In the Wings” episode on stage management, we see her working on our production of The Bacchae from 2009.
Finally, I’d like to point you to the episode on puppetry design with Emily DeCola. Not only is she part of the fantastic Puppet Kitchen and great fun to work with, but she’s one of the puppeteers on our upcoming production of Compulsion, which starts tech today.
