I am back from the 18th (or 19th?) official S*P*A*M conference. This year’s host was Jim Luther, the Prop Director at Childsplay Theatre in Arizona. On the Saturday of the conference, he led us on a tour of his props shop and their facilities.
The front room of the shop is the “clean” room, which also had a number of props out for display. Jim showed us some pieces as we looked around. Continue reading Childsplay Theatre
The following is from a newspaper column entitled, “Some Odds and Ends from Stageland’s Daily Gossip”, first published in 1903.
Some idea of the varied collection of objects which accumulate in the property room of a theatre is to be obtained from a description of the contents of the old Boston Museum property room, which will soon be scattered to the four winds. In a general way the public has learned to know that the “property man” of a theatre is one who looks after such details of the productions as concern chairs and tables, the bottles that the people pour their liquor from, and the pen and ink used by the heroine to indite her loving messages.
The master of properties must still be a resourceful person, but in the old days, where the frequent changes of bills necessitated additional “props” every week or so, the ingenuity of this functionary was often taxed to the utmost. The property room of the Museum is thus described in The Boston Globe:
“The apothecary’s shop in ‘Romeo and Juliet’ wasn’t a circumstance to the old property-manufacturing shop in the cellar of the Museum, where may be seen skulls and crossbones, stuffed animals of both wild and domestic species, wings for witches, angels, and decils, and other curious things that can’t be enumerated in a column. The animals, both real and of papier maché, repose on shelves all around the walls, a weird, grinning, motley troupe of once indispensable stage characters that would have brought their possessor to the stake in witchcraft days, and all destined for the dirt heap within a few days.
“There are the wolves’ heads, with gleaming teeth, fangs, and eyes, that were wont to be thrust beneath the door of the log cabin which the stout arm of Frank Mayo held in place in the thrilling honeymoon scene in ‘Davy Crockett.’ The big bellows with which Tilly Slowboy once blew the fire in ‘The Cricket on the Hearth’ hangs upon the wall, and the cradle in which she rocked the baby lies in a corner. In another corner are stacked old rusty muskets, including some flintlocks that defended the breastworks in Dr. Jones’s centennial drama, ‘The Battle of Bunker Hill’ twenty-eight years ago.
“From the centre of the ceiling, suspended by strings, hang three mangy looking stuffed animals that were once features in conveying the moral lessons taught by the waxwork tableaus, sold more that a decade ago. For sixty years these animals, a domestic cat, a dog, and a monkey, have been comrades, but they must now go the way of all else identified with the Museum.
“The cat and dog, now half hairless and showing repulsively their dried-up gums and loosened teeth, used to be pictures of ease and contentment when representing the sole objects of the affection of the old maid and the old bach in a wax tableau.
“The monkey had his mission to fill also, but what it was is now forgotten. Of late years he has hung by a movable string before the door of the property room in such a way that he would drop with a dull thud on the breast of any one entering the door, a startling experience for an unsuspecting stranger, which has contributed to the enjoyment of the property man’s life, however.
“In another part of the cellar is stored a raft of stage furniture of every kind. There are the seats of Caesar and Brutus from the Senate house, the royal chairs of Macbeth and his restless helpmeet, the big, glittering chair in which John Wilkes Booth was crowned as Richard III., and the gracefully formed mediaeval chairs in which Hamlet has oft pondered the proposition, ‘To be, or not to be.’
“There are stacks of spears and halberds and Roman standards, and a pathetic souvenir in the shape of a rude human effigy of burlap stuffed with excelsior, which is recognized as the dummy used in the burial of Ophelia, over which the Queen strews flowers and weeps and says, ‘Sweets to the sweet, fair maid.'”
From The New York Times. May 17, 1903.
The following excerpt was originally published in the March 6, 1898, of The New York Times. It is not only interesting in its description of a theatrical prop store and shop in Midtown Manhattan at the end of the nineteenth century, but remarkable in the fact that the proprietor is a woman. Unfortunately, the article never mentions her name!
She has thunder by the sheet, fog by the yard, lightning by the box, snow by the bushel, and the child who cries for the moon can get it there, if he will only wait until it is manufactured. It won’t be made out of green cheese, either, but more likely from pale blue silk, for moons have been made out of that before now, and they were eminently satisfactory and couldn’t have been told by any one but a connoisseur from the real article; and who is a connoisseur in moons?
And the mistress of all these natural elements is not a Mme. Jove, either, but a nice, ordinary, every day sort of woman, and this queer collection of hers is merely food for herself and her children. Not literally, for even a pretty, pale blue silk moon might be indigestible, but she provides them for “the profession,” and indirectly they become oatmeal and coffee, roast beef and plum pudding.
It might be thought that the establishment where all these strange things are to be found would resemble those regions supposed to take a low position in the universe, and to be the home of all things unpleasant and flamable, but it doesn’t. It is a modest little place, not so far from Thirtieth Street, on the line of the elevated road and the proper business of the proprietor, when it is called by its right name, is that of dealer in theatrical hardware. The visitor would not even guess, in taking a view of the stock, that the word theatrical was appropriate, for nothing but small articles of seemingly ordinary hardware are in sight.
That is not strange, as there is never a demand for the same kind of thunder, lightning, or other theatrical appliances which are supplied on demand of the property man or the stage carpenter, and very little of anything is kept on hand, though they can be had at a moment’s notice. The hardware proper is the most prosaic part of the business. That consists of the wheels, bolts, screws—everything that is needed to make the curtains and scenery of a theatre stay where they are wanted, and move when they are not wanted. Continue reading A Place to Buy Thunder, 1898
First of all, tomorrow is Propmaster Day, so mark your calendar. At last year’s S*P*A*M conference, the office of the Mayor of Louisville presented the attendees with a plaque proclaiming July 24th to be Propmaster Day. I say we celebrate it every year. More importantly, that we keep Propmaster Day in our hearts all year ’round.
As part of this year’s conference, we were given a tour of the San Francisco Opera by Lori Harrison, their master of properties. First of all, the stage is huge.
They do their entire season in repertory, sometimes having two changeovers a day when a matinée and evening show are different. Ms. Harrison told us they have about sixteen people in the properties department during the season. Even though more and more operas are being brought in from other shops and opera houses, they still have a lot of work in the props department. Frequently, shops do not understand the rigors and particulars of opera, and furniture pieces need to be rebuilt. Even when props have been built for other operas, the San Francisco Opera has its own unique characteristics that may require rebuilding or adaptation to make the props fit through all the openings and passageways in the path from storage to stage. Finally, as many of us know, a bulk of the props in a show spring forth from the rehearsal process. Even an opera that was “set in stone” at another opera house will have additions and changes to the props before it is performed at the San Francisco Opera.
You have to hand it to the San Francisco Opera; they have a lot of work to do and not a lot of room to do it in. Props are stored throughout the catwalks and on shelves tucked in every little nook and cranny. There is also a small hand props room for common and reusable items on another floor; in addition, they have a warehouse off-site to store larger furniture pieces.
In one of these hidden corners, we came across one of the Opera’s original wind machines dating back to 1932. The fan was about six feet (1.8m) in diameter, and in place of blades were lengths of rubber tubing. They also stored an old-fashioned thunder machine, but it was inside a box and hanging from the ceiling.
Perhaps most striking was the props shop itself; it was much smaller than the props shop at the Public Theatre, and they probably build a lot more large props from scratch, and employ a lot more artisans than us. It just goes to show that there’s always a more efficient way to use the space you’re given.
I found a great article on the making of an opera from 1999 in the San Francisco Weekly. If you read through to the second page, it starts talking about props, and Lori Harrison has a lot of great insights into the process. She says one thing in particular though that I really want to point out:
As the first woman to run the San Francisco Opera prop shop, Harrison, who’s now in her second season in that position, says that it took awhile for some people to get used to the idea of having her in charge. “And some are still getting used to it,” she admits. But while she was prepared for a certain amount of prejudice, there was one particular issue when she first started that caught her off guard. “The question asked was would I rather be called a ‘prop master’ or a ‘prop mistress,'” she says.
“I think ‘master’ works a little better. It expresses mastery over something.”
Hear, hear. To all the prop masters of the world, male or female, have a Happy Propmasters Day tomorrow.
From “The Secret Regions of the Stage”, by Olive Logan, originally published in 1874.
The property-room of the theatre is a quaint and curious place. Here are kept the innumerable miscellaneous objects used on the stage, from the phial of poison which the apothecary selects from his beggarly array of empty boxes and sells to Romeo, to the banquet with which Macbeth regales his guests, and which the ghost of Banquo so unceremoniously interrupts. Purses full of tin coin; letters blank and letters written for certain pieces; kingly crowns; fairy wands: soldiers’ helmets, pistols, swords; pasteboard fowls, legs of mutton, and fruit — every thing, in fact, which is used on the stage, except scenery, costumes, and sets of furniture, is kept in the property-room. So motley an array is here, one wonders how the presiding genius of the place, the property-man, can remember where he puts things, and how he finds room for them when he does remember. A natural wonder, too, is that numbers of his articles do not get lost, being in nightly use, and passing, by the action of the play, through many hands. But a rule of the stage exacts a fine from any player who, being the last to use a “property,” fails to return it to the property-man, from whose hands it is nightly received by him who first uses it. Thus the ring which Juliet hands the nurse, with the injunction:
