Quick Window Awning

I made this quick window awning for Living Large in a Mini Kind of Way at 16th Street Theatre. We had a limited budget, and needed to build the awning to fit the small window on the set, and wanted the sides to remain open to keep the awning feeling light and decorative (thus eliminating the easiest solution of building a hard structure and covering it with fabric. 

 I found these shelf brackets with closet rod hooks on ends at Menards. By turning them upside down I was able to get the perfect shape for my frame.

 Bonus- they are pre-drilled to screw directly into the set.

 I cut a small piece of PVC pipe to fit between the two brackets and screwed it into the closet rod hooks (also already pre-drilled for me).

Then all I needed to do was staple the fabric in on the top, and secure it along the bottom with some double stick carpet tape along the PVC.
The fabric of the awning was just standard muslin which the set designer painted. Because the fabric was stiffened so much by the paint, I was able to cut the curves into the end without needing to do any stitching or sealing to prevent fraying.

Running water onstage

About a year ago, when someone initially described this trick to me in a production meeting, I looked at him like he was crazy. "There is absolutely no way that will work, "I told him. But of course it did, and I had to admit I was wrong. So here is an explanation of how to create a very easy, very effective system for running water onstage. 

 

 First, the tools. The core of the system is a hudson sprayer/garden sprayer. These are available in the garden section at most hardware stores, but be aware they can be a seasonal item at some places, so you may have to order one and wait for shipping in the winter months.

 Then you need fittings that can allow you to attach the sprayer to your sink/water spout/drinking fountain etc.

 I bought this specific fitting to fit onto the tap of the sink.

 And this one, with the barbed end to fit into the end of the hose of the sprayer.

 Then a few connectors in between that step up sizes and connect mismatched ends to make it all fit together. You will notice I used thread tape (available in the plumbing section) on all of the connections between the pieces. It is important that your system holds air pressure, so you will need a tight seal on all joints.

 Then the system is connected to the sink that the tech director had installed in the counter.

 And we attach a pipe down through the sink sink drain into a bucket, so that the water draining out didn't make an unnatural sound.

And when you pump the garden sprayer and then turn on the faucet, you get a nice steady stream of water.

Now to explain why it works: 

The way the garden sprayer usually works is that, by pumping the top handle you create an excessive amount of pressure in the canister. When the handle is squeezed on the sprayer, the pressure has a way to be released. since the hose is attached to a straw, down at the bottom of the canister, the liquid at the bottom of the canister is the first thing to be pushed out through the hose. 

When you disconnect the hose from the sprayer, and connect it to a faucet, you get the same result. The system is closed and sealed until the faucet is turned on. At that point the pressure inside the canister forces the water out though the hose, and out the faucet. 

Please remember that you are only connecting to either the hot or the cold side of the sink. I connected to the cold, if the hot also got turned on, it resulted in an open spout in the system, and the water was allowed to go where it was not intended (creating a temporarily confusing mess). 

We also had a problem on this show because the garden sprayer was particularly cheap, and the effect occurred very late in the performance. Before during tech rehearsals we noticed that, while the system would function perfectly while setting up, by the time we got to the moment in the show, we would be getting no water. The pressure in the tank was slowly leaking out over the course of the show. The simple solution in this case was to run the hose out the back wall of the set to allow the ASM to pump up the tank just prior to the moment when it needed to work. 

Potting fake plants

For Living Large in a Mini Kind of Way at 16th street theatre, we decided that in the last scene it be great for the two characters to be gardening while they talked. The director asked if I could provide supplies for the actors to fill three flower pots that could fit into the window box (which is filled with obviously fake flowers for the rest of the show).

 I started by purchasing the most natural looking small flowers I could find at Michaels. I found some pansies that looked right, and a stem of greenery that matched the leaves nicely. The pansies also made sense becuase they were one of the few fake flowers I could find that is actually sold in small flats of annuals at nurseries.
I cut small pieces of the flower stem and the greenery and pushed them into chunks of styrofoam.

Gethsemane nursery and garden center in Chicago was able to help me out by giving me some empty plastic containers that the annual flowers would come in, and a flat tray to hold them (they are my go-to location for anything having to do with plants or gardens in Chicago).

 I carved the foam away so that each piece fit nicely into the slots in the container.

 and then I painted them all with a coat of van dyke brown paint.

The result was very convincing and effective, and looked great as the actors placed them into real pots, and then used a small spade and their hands to fill in around them with real potting soil (which could be reused nightly).

To All The Small Theatre Companies

I had a wonderful meeting with a woman the other morning. She is planning to produce her first storefront show here in Chicago, with the hopes of continuing to produce with the same group as a new theatre company. We talked a bit about resources here in Chicago, the way tech tends to be scheduled, things that are typically written into designer contracts, and payment schedules.
She also asked me a very interesting question- What makes me want to work with a company that can't pay me what I'm worth? What can a small company offer to me as an artist, besides money, to make me want to work with them.
I gave her a long list, and I figured, why not share it with anyone else who could use it.
In no particular order:

• Be up front with me from the first email. "We don't have a lot of money" is what I usually hear, which is honest, but if I don't know exact dollar amounts, it is impossible to have a productive conversation. This is partially because I need to look at my personal budget and see if I can afford to do this show, but more because I need to know if it is possible to do the show, at the level of quality I hold myself to, for the amount in the budget. 
• On a similar point, it is really helpful to have a conversation with the director about what is possible and what is not possible for me to do on this show with this budget. If the director and I start out on the same page, the budget can be any size, but if the director has aspirations bigger than her budget, it doesn't matter what size the budget is, we will both end up unhappy with the end product. 
• Treat the things I provide you with respect. I will not get frustrated if something breaks, especially in rehearsal when you are trying new ideas, that is part of the process. I will get frustrated if pieces are lost, or not stored safely, or if I give you specific instructions for the use or care of something and those instructions are ignored. 
• Get me involved in the production process as soon as possible. I love working on shows where production meetings start months before the first rehearsal, even if we only have one or two. I love to be in a room full of artists talking about the meaning of the play, what we would like to communicate to the audience, what sort of language we all want to work with in terms of color, and shape and texture that could apply to all design elements? I love conversations about why we are doing this show in this time and this place, who our audience is, how we want them to interact with the characters etc. Productions that start this way always seem to lead to more collaborative production teams, which helps produce work that we can all take pride in. 
• Continue that type of artistic collaboration throughout. I distinctly remember sitting in a production meeting after a first preview; the lighting designer mentioned that he had been distracted during the performance by the squeaking stool in the stage manager's booth behind him, he figured that she may not have been aware that the sound was carrying. The ASM indignantly turned to the room and asked "Did the lighting designer just give stage management a note?" The room went silent, and after that no designer felt very comfortable giving a suggestion or even asking a question to another department, and an atmosphere like that can only hurt a show. An open conversation between all departments about what is working and what isn't from sound cues to script choices allows everyone in the room to take advantage of the collective knowledge of so many theatre practitioners  Collaborative environments with open conversations make me feel like I am growing as an artist, and that makes me want to come back to work with you. 
• Feed me. I know it's little and I know it's silly, but something to eat that I don't have to think about goes a long way to making tech more pleasant and making me feel appreciated.  Also if I am running around like that, I often forget to eat, and I get pretty cranky before I realize I'm probably just hungry, this is not a time when I am doing my best work. 
• Do something about parking if possible. If you can make an arrangement with a local lot, or reimburse me for some of my meter receipts, or even have an ASM ready to run out and grab something from me when I pull up so that I don't have to circle for an hour to find a space close enough that I can carry all the everything from my car, that would be awesome. While many theatres in town are easily accessible by public transportation, that doesn't help me when I have a car full of props (costume designers have this issue too, help them out if you can).
• I worked with a theatre that did a talkback with each person involved after each show. I met two company members (who had not been directly involved in this production) for coffee and talked for an hour about what went well, what didn't, what I would do differently if I could do it again, and then about what my career goals and aspirations were in general. It was awesome. It made me feel appreciated, respected, and I got some great feedback and career advice.  
• Get me keys to the space, if you can (if you are renting I know this is much less doable). If I can drop off big pieces at any time of day regardless of who else is around and available it makes my job so much easier. It is hard to keep shopping for furniture if there is a dining table taking up the entire bed of my pickup truck.  
• Pay attention from the beginning to where the trouble spots are going to be. One of my favorite  theatre companies does this particularly well. Time, labor, and budget resources are directed to the department who will need them most. I know if I am doing a big props show with them I will have a bigger budget, a bigger fee, a few more one-on-one meetings with the director and/or the set designer and I'll have the production manager offering to help me track down big pieces. I see the same support being thrown behind other designers when it is a heavy costume or lights show. If I know I will be taken care of when I need help, I will keep coming back regardless of whether the support was directed to my department this time. 
• Do interesting shows with a clear mission. The more targeted you are about what you do and what makes you different from everyone else, the more intriguing you are. The more passionate you are about WHY you choose to do what you do, the more likely I will becoming interested and involved in your mission and invested in your success. The rule of thumb I tell people is, that I should be able to give you ten amazing plays that you would love to see, and you should be able to eliminate seven of them immediately because they aren't a good fit for your company. If you can't do that, you need a more focused vision. 
• Prop Freeze! This is my favorite new thing. The idea is that we set a date during the rehearsal process when the director is supposed to stop adding new props (with a couple of companies this has been first tech). After the freeze date the director can still ask for new things and for changes, and I will do them to the best of my ability, but I also have the ability to tell them without any guilt that there is no longer enough time or money to make that change. With some directors, this would hardly ever come up, but with others, it's really good to know I have a safety net in case they make a last minute outlandish request. 
• Get me help. I have lots of ways I can use untrained labor. There is always a repetitive project that could use another set of hands, and I love to teach. Even one or two hours on one day can be awesome and make me feel supported.
• Understand that I will likely leave when I'm done. Especially on smaller shows, if I have completed all of my notes and haven't been getting notes from other people, I'm probably going to stop coming to previews and I may not make it to opening. This is not because I don't like the show or hanging out with you, this is probably because I need to start working on my next show. If you are understanding and respectful of this, I am much more likely to want to work with you again. 
• Remember, I need to keep working with these vendors. A few years ago, I performed a props miracle and was able to get a high-end furniture store to loan me several expensive modern furniture pieces for a production. At the time I was driving a small car, but the company manager assured me that they had someone with a pickup who would help to return the pieces to the store after strike. I  learned about a year later that they never returned the pieces. I could never bring myself to show my face in that store again (it recently closed).
• Hire cool people. A lot of this will be contingent on doing some of these other things so that the cool people want to keep coming back. Nothing will make me sign on for a low paying show quicker than a list of people involved that I like working with. 

Altered Mission Desk

For The City and The City at Lifeline Theater we had been using this old mission style desk from stock for a rehearsal furniture piece. I was having a bit of trouble finding a final show piece in our budget that was long enough to fit four people seated and thin enough to fit though an incredibly narrow doorway. 

Eventually the designer and I had a discussion and decided that maybe we already had the perfect piece, it just needed some adjustment to make it look a bit less recognizable as a mission style desk. 

I started by removing the stretcher from the front side, and replacing it with one center. 

I also cut out two of the five slats on each end to get rid of the distinctive mission style look. 

I cut the legs on one end and added castors so that the table could be moved easily, like a wheelbarrow by one person. 

Add some silver paint and a coat of hammered steel spray paint for texture and we ended up with a table that is believable in a morgue and looks appropriate in a conference room as well. 

The evolution of a weapon

 In the The City and The City at Lifeline Theater I had a very interesting design challenge. The play takes place in a fictional alternate reality, that is very realistic and similar to our own. Part of the show takes place at an archaeological dig and over the course of the show we hear that there are rumors about the artifacts being found there, "strange physics," "magic properties" etc.
In the final scene the audience gets to see one of these magical artifacts. The villain is holding a piece and threatening the detective with it, "do you want to see what it can do?"
I needed something that looked like it could be centuries old, but still technologically advanced, and that could plausibly keep the detective on edge about what kind of threat it was.

 This was the Nerf weapon that I started with as a base.

 I spray painted it this cranberry color, then used spikes made out of bake-able clay, marbles and stones to create this look. It was all wrong, and yet I wasn't sure quite how to fix it. It looked far too "gun-like" it's function seemed obvious, and it's design was far more "Lost in Space" than ancient artifact.

 For round two I removed all of the dart holders and firing mechanisms from the front of the gun. I figured shortening the barrel would make it less obviously gun-like.

 The bits of plastic and rough cut edges inside also made it look a bit more antiqued and less polished.

 Then I added more stones, crystals on top, and a round white "magic-egg" (that was what it was labeled as in the store) on the inside.

 I still hated the look of the piece after the second draft was done. I decided the finish was the problem. It was just too smooth and plastic-y to have believable been in the ground for centuries. I mixed a handful of sawdust with some metallic paint and covered everything but the stones.

 Finally I was pretty happy with the piece, unfortunately the play-write and director were not. Because of the way the scene was blocked, the audience ends up staring directly down the barrel of the gun for the majority of the scene. The white egg wasn't reading as magical, and the way the handle was held made it still feel too much like an altered gun.

 For round four I cut off the bottom of the handle to force the actor to grip the piece differently. I then added a tapered dowel to the bottom of the handle to add a second stabbing weapon to the piece.  I removed the white stone egg, and added springs, washers, nuts, and other random hardware to make the magic of the piece feel more like a technical marvel than the fair tale magic feeling all those stones were giving it. After adding these pieces, I did another coat of a different colored metallic paint and sawdust to add a corroded look to the mechanisms.

 Finally, everyone was happy with the weapon.

And because the nerf guns came in a two pack, I got to get this awesome before and after picture.

Poster Rig

 For The City and The City, at Lifeline Theatre we had the interesting challenge of attaching fliers and posters to the walls over the course of the show, and then needing to take them down halfway through. We experimented with various poster putties and sticky dots, but they either didn't reliably stick to the walls (nothing like pieces of paper randomly falling during serous moments to distract actors and audience members), or they stuck too well and took paint with them when they got pulled off quickly.

 For our final solution we ended up using magnets. I purchased these tiny, super-strong magnets at Michael's.

 We printed the posters on card-stock so that they could last the abuse of the run without getting destroyed

 And I attached the magnet to the back of each poster by placing it underneath a large strip of clear packing tape.

 I added slightly larger silver screws to the walls in the places I wanted to hang the posters.

 The magnets were strong enough that as long as the actor started by lining up the poster close to the correct spot, the magnet would grab the screw and leave the poster easily hanging in position.

 From a distance the screws completely disappeared on the textured "concrete" wall.

And here it is filled with posters

 I was a bit worried about how to do the same trick on the brick side wall of the theatre, but as it turns out, there had been plenty of concrete anchors installed in the wall for various shows over the years.

 I picked to anchors in spots roughly where we needed posters, and screwed in a washer to make the spot visible to the actor.

They were able to stick posters to the brick wall just as easily as the built set wall.

UV Lamp

In Disconnect at Victory Gardens, one of the hardest pieces to figure out was a UV lamp that had to be assembled onstage and then light (why do play-writes do these things to us?)

First, just for fun, are a couple pictures of the box I created. By the way, I bought the perfect box at The Container Store, which I forget about sometimes, and then every few shows I am reminded how useful and awesome they are. Add a few collaged images printed in different sized, and it looks pretty sleek from the audience. 

The lamp, in it's deconstructed state fits perfectly inside the box with a fake set of instructions for assembling. 

When it comes out of the box, the lamp looks like this, with the top and base only attached together by the wire running between them. Also, totally unrelated, this is the image where you can best see the purple gel I added to help the light read as more UV and less white LED. 

As you can see in this next image, the lamp was originally constructed with the top fitting onto the base using a ball-in-socket type joint.  

Using my Dremel I ground the metal down on the ball so that it was flat on two sides. I also used the grinder on the Dremel to open up the hole in the socket a bit so that the flattened ball would slip right in.

Here you can see that it slipped on fairly easily without pinching the wire.

Finally the actress holds the base and twists the top into place. By rotating the top 90 degrees, she now has the rounded sides of the ball facing perpendicular to the slot. These sides of the ball are too wide to pass through the slot, so the top of the lamp is locked in place. 

And here is a picture of how the lamp looks fully assembled. 

Though I rewired the inside of the lamp several times (I broke lots of wires troubleshooting, and wired out the switch so I could give the lighting designer absolute control), I left the original plug and LEDs so the lamp was still functional. I especially loved hearing the audience around me quietly gasp when the light turns on because they weren't expecting it to actually work :)