Greenware breakable dishes

It is an old theatrical trick to use "greenware" when plates or other dishes need to be broken onstage. Greenware is essentially un-fired pottery.

I had a bit of trouble tracking some down in Chicago, but was eventually able to speak to a manager of a "paint your own pattery" store, who was able to order them directly from his supplier when he went out for his weekly pickup. I needed enough mugs, plates and bowls to smash one set every show for ten runs (Four perfomances, plus 6 rehearsals).

I was able to get the pieces for $3 each, which was about what I was expecting. For a long running show, this would have been a serious portion of my budget, but for this short run, the price was reasonable.  

It did take much longer than expected to track down the pieces and then to get them from the supplier. Next time I will already have made the contact (if I am here in the city) but I still will make sure to start the process from the moment I have a hint of needing breakable objects, to make sure we have them in plenty of time.

Once we determined that the pieces worked during tech, the biggest problem was that they seemed obvious. As soon as the actor picked up the dish of the shelf you could guess he was going to break it. The simple grey color was begging to be smashed. So we decided to add a pattern. The first thing I tried were some wide artist's markers, but the not-quite-dry clay soaked up the ink, dried out the markers and gummed up the tips. It looked great, but was time consuming and wasteful of the nice markers. 

 I took a trip to Blick Art supplies to find a solution, and the man there recommended I try oil pastels. They worked perfectly. I was able to trace lines smoothly and quickly on the surface of the dishes, and a coat of spray sealer over each dish kept the pastel from rubbing off when I was finished. 

 Best of all, the design achieved the desired effect. From a distance the dishes looked so nicely designed that seeing them smashed was much more shocking. 

 I have very few photos of the smashed dishes. They crumble easily (which is the point), but since the scene continued with 20 more minutes of very physical comedy after the plates were smashed, the pieces onstage were basically dust by the time we hit a break. 

This photo shows the sharpest point I could find on the smashed plate I was able to photograph. I was able to run my finger back and forth across this point without any pain. In fact, the only damage done by rubbing my finger across it, was to the plate, which became more worn down and rounded each time I dragged my finger across. 

One safety concern we did have to consider, as actors continued to walk back and forth on the smashed dishes in the scene, the dust go on their shoes. They tracked that dust around the stage, which caused things to get very slick and slippery. Once we realized the problem, we were able to mostly guard against it, and the stage crew made sure to be extra diligent when they cleaned at intermission, but it is something to be aware of and plan for if you can. 

Wooden Rock

I have some pretty cool projects coming up from Lifeline's production of A Tale of Two Cities. This first simple one only took about an hour, and turned out very well. I'll probably use this trick again. 

I needed a large rock that would be used, by an actor, to hit another actor on the head and knock him out. The moment was well choreographed stage violence, so the rock never really comes in contact with the actor's head. Still a real rock would have been heavy, dangerous, and harder to control. 

After the hit happens, the rock is dropped onto the wooden deck where the actors are standing. The fake rock needed to be hard and dense enough to make a convincing noise when dropped. 

I decided the use a similar solution to the one I used for the axe a few months ago. I decided to create the rock from a large piece of wood. 

 I found this 4x4x6" piece in the scrap bin in the shop. 

 I started by taking it to the chop saw. I set a 45 degree angle and began cutting off corners to give myself a rough shape. I twisted and turned the block until I had made a cut on every square edge I could (as soon as I could no longer safely and firmly hold a flat edge against the fence while I cut, I stopped). 

 After the chop saw I took my rough-cut-crystal-looking piece of wood to the belt sander. 

 I used the flat part of the belt sander to round over all the hard edges and then used the rounded end of the sander to introduce new ridges and divots, trying to remove all flat and smooth surfaces. 

 After getting approval from the director on the size and shape. I took it to paint. 

 A first coat of brown paint provided the base, 

Then an uneven dusting of grey spray paint gave it texture.  

 The final piece is large enough to appear dangerous, easily gripped, light enough to be well controlled by the actor, but heavy and solid enough to provide a convincing sound when dropped. 

Barbed Wire Crown

For Paulus at Silk Road Rising, we needed a barbed wire crown to put onto one of the actors. It was supposed to be very similar to the biblical crown of thorns. I first tried to make the crown out of twisted wire, with twisted and hand-cut barbs hot glued to it. I didn't like the outcome. I was able to glue the barbs in place so that they were all pointed away from the actors head, and to round the ends of them a bit, but they still seemed dangerous. If any of the barbs came loose from the glue, the actor was in danger of the barb twisting and scratching his head. 

The tech director on the show told me that he had seen barbed wire made before with rubber barbs. I found this website, which seems to make it their specialty http://www.actionprops.com/catalog/item/2278608/1717355.htm, but it was a bit expensive, and also a bit late in the process to be ordering something and waiting for shipping. 

I decided to try to make it myself. 

I found these rubber necklaces at Michael's. 

 I cut them into pieces about three inches long and then tied them onto the twisted wire crown I had created for a rehearsal prop. 

 The rubber allowed the actors to be safer when handling the prop, while I was able to make it look more dangerous. I cut the tips of each rubber barb at a steep angle to make them appear sharp, and was able to allow the barbs to point in all directions, instead of all needing to point deliberately out. 

A quick coat of silver paint resulted in a very convincing looking "crown of thorns". The only problem I have run into is that, since the rubber barbs can bend and flex, the silver paint slowly cracks and flakes off. It needs to be touched up once in a while, but that is something I can do quickly when I stop by the theatre. 

Stage Hay Bale

It is a personal rule of mine that I never put real hay bales onstage. Real bales of hay are heavy, they shed, they are impossible to adequately fireproof, and inevitably lead to allergy problems with someone on the cast or crew. 

 When I can't convince the director or scene designer to use some other option (are you sure you the actors can't be sitting on these lovely wooden crates?), I have developed a method for making hay bales out of foam and raffia. 

The raffia bales don't shed nearly as much, and when they do the pieces are long and easy to quickly pick up; they are light and easy to carry, can be efficiently sprayed with fireproofing, and have yet to cause allergy problems in any of the shows I've used them in.

 I start by creating foam block the size of the bale I want. This one is made from many layers of 1" foam glued together, because that was cheapest and most accessible at the time. I glued the layers together with liquid nails, and then used more liquid nails to do the initial attaching of the raffia. 

Note: This is a messy process, and required lots of dry time. I would coat one side with glue, lay the raffia into the glue, place something on top of the raffia to hold it down, and then wait for it to dry. Once it was dry I turned the bale to the next side and repeated the process. 

After the initial round of glueing, I went back over the entire bale with a hot glue gun, pulling and pressing and gluing more specific spots, catching loose ends, tucking in wild pieces and making sure that corners were covered. 

To hold everything together even more, I wrapped the bale in this wired twine (found in the floral department of the craft store).

 Each stand was wrapped around the bale, pulled as tight as possible and then twisted together to lock it in place. 

I could then take the loose ends and press them down into the foam block so that no actors can get poked by the loose ends of the wire.

And here is the final product.

To my high school physics teacher

A couple of nights ago I was called into a theatre, where I regularly work, to help last minute, with a special effect that the designer was having trouble with. Almost immediately I saw the problem. The spring he was using to power the mechanism was in the wrong place, and even better, it could be easily moved. "The spring is too close to your pivot point," I told him, "If you put it here instead, the spring has to do far less work to achieve the same result." Hearing an explanation like that come out of my mouth solidified my need to write this post.

In high school I disliked science. To be perfectly honest, all the way through school, science was my least favorite subject. That probably had something to do with the fact that I was an over-achiever and a perfectionist, and my lowest grades were always in my science classes. But also I think it had quite a bit to do with my confidence that science would have nothing to do with my life after graduation. I was going into theatre after all, why did I care about DNA pairing or the periodic table? Junior year of high school though, I took a physics class with Mr Wojak. He was fun, he cracked jokes, he broke information down with clever analogies and sometimes songs.

Having so much fun in Mr Wojak's class gave me the confidence to try physics again in college when the chance came up. I worked harder to understand that class than almost any other I took in all four years. I found a homework buddy, and together we worked through the assigned problems once a week, then, almost without fail, the two of us would parade over to the professor's office to ask him to explain that one problem (or two or three) neither of us could figure out.

And the point of all of this is that it worked. Though I had no idea at the time that I would use these things (I was just doing it because I had to take a science course and physics had been the only science I had ever previously enjoyed), it turns out I use my physics knowledge more on a daily basis than almost anything else I learned in the course of my schooling. I rarely use the specific formulas, and when I do I have to look them up, but I use the knowledge, the understanding of forces and how they relate to one another, every day.

I use my physics knowledge to understand how to re-enforce a piece of furniture so that it will withstand the abuse of actors using it every day through the run of a show. I use my physics knowledge when I am constructing a puppet, to understand how to use the potential energy of a spring to make a head nod or a mouth talk. I use physics to construct all sorts of rigging, knowing how to use pulleys and angles to direct force so that a magic trick can be triggered by someone across the room. I use my knowledge of friction and forces to analyze and understand gears and levers, allowing me to take apart, fix and reassemble broken antiques (a lighter, a clock, a hand powered drill, etc). I could go on for pages with specific examples of projects that have asked me to use my knowledge of physics, and I'm saying this now because no one ever told me. Even once I decided I was going to go into technical theatre, I don't remember anyone recommending I take a physics course.

For several years after college, as I started to do more and more of this type of work, I thought that these things I was working with were common knowledge, logical reasoning, a basic understanding of the world. Recently though, I have realized that this knowledge is not as obvious as I had believed. Not all of my colleagues have these skills. My strong base of physics understanding sets me apart; it is a specific specialty I have and an advantage in the job market. So thank you to Mr Wojak, and to my college physics professor (whose name I am ashamed to say I have forgotten), though I am sure I did not show you enough appreciation at the time,  the lessons I learned from you have turned out to be incredibly valuable. And to any current technical theatre students, look into your university's physics offerings, you'll be glad you did.