Never be afraid to ask...for WAY more than you can afford

An Inspector Calls at Remy Bumppo, turned out beautifully, with a huge beautiful oriental rug and beautifully finished wood furniture. 

When we started work on the show, and the set designer sent me research with images of the type of furniture he was imagining, I was worried. I knew my budget was not enough to be able to purchase anything. 

 Then, when I discovered that none of my go-to rental sources had anything, I was even more worried. 

 I hoped that I would find someone on craigslist selling something beat-up that I could repair, or something they didn't know the value of. But after weeks of looking I had nothing.

 While out running other errands in the city, I drove past an antique store that I hadn't been in for years. I had long ago ruled it out as being more expensive that I could afford on any of my budgets. I figured it couldn't hurt to stop in, and I was desperate. 

 Walking into the store I immediately knew I had to find a way to work with them. The furniture in the store was right out of the research images. 

 I approached the owner and told him the situation. I had $X to spend and knew that was far less than he should charge me for a rental of all the pieces I wanted. I could offer him comp tickets to see the show and an insert ad in the program (with a guesstimated value of $X, which would be seen by approximately X number of people). I would take responsibility for the safety of the items while they were in the theater's possession, and the show itself is fairly tame, no large fights, no one treating the furniture roughly etc.

 I was also able to provide him with a copy of the company's insurance policy, to assure him that, should some unforeseen incident harm his pieces, we would be able to compensate him. 

 He agreed to the rental and we have a beautiful dining room set with a table, six chairs, two beautiful gold mirrors, an overhead light fixture, and buffet and a marble top server for exactly what I had in the budget. 

 As precautions to preserve the condition of the furniture, we made sure to tell the cast and the set construction crew that it was rented and valuable, so that they take extra care with it. I have also given the ASM some nice furniture polish and rags. Every evening after the performance she wipes off and polishes the top of the dining table, to make sure no drops of liquid from the show are left on it, and to keep it in beautiful condition. 

Egg carton spiders

This project, for the children's show Click Clack Boo, at Lifeline theatre feels like it belongs on Pinterest more than on my blog. In this play the animals on the farm are planning a Halloween party. I was a little confused about how to proceed with the decorations for the party at the end, until I happened across this picture. 

Of course! Cow, Pig, Hen and Duck would use the supplies they had around the farm to make the decorations. 

I made a couple of these milk jug ghosts, made some paper chains, with jute rope twisted through them, and then had the idea for these spiders. 

 First I cut a 12 egg carton in half. 

 I left the center two egg spaces whole and cut the outer four into strips to make the legs. Scissors worked well on this Styrofoam egg carton, for the recycled paper ones I found that a sharp exact-o knife or box cutter was a better tool. 

 I painted my spiders black, 

and then added googly eyes, because everything is better with googly eyes. 

Never Be Afraid to Ask...Coke Cooler

For The Lake Effect at Silk Road Rising, the set designer wanted a standing Coke cooler in the corner of our set (a small family-owned Indian restaurant).
I was a bit worried about the idea, because our budget was fairly limited and I knew that purchasing one would be cost prohibitive. Also, a quick search on ebay and craigslist turned up only antique or vintage models.
Pretty quickly I realized that the only way we were going to get what we needed would be to go straight to the source. I called Coca-Cola.
I happened to have learned many years ago, when my grandfather was closing his old family pharmacy, that the big drink coolers found in restaurants and convenience stores do not belong to the stores themselves, but to the drink companies. Pepsi, Coke and other brands set up an account with the store owners, provide the coolers and then deliver the stock to fill it.
I found a service number on the Coca-Cola website, called and explained to the person who answered what I needed. I was sent to three or four different people, explaining our needs to each representative and then being forwarded on to the person who they believed could best help me. Eventually I spoke to Jose, who was able to figure out how to code the delivery for company records and arrange a time to deliver our machine. It arrived on schedule without any problems and immediately made the set look so much more like a real restaurant. All of this has been COMPLETELY FREE!
One of the most important parts of making something like this happen is good phone communication skills. With every person I spoke to I acknowledged that this was of course a strange request, and mentioned over and over again how much the help was appreciated. I stayed open and flexible in terms of what arrangements could work for us. I mentioned that we are a non-for-profit, and offered to provide any documentation that would be needed for tax records (they have not indicated that they needed anything at this point). I also made a point to tell them that the machine, and the logo would be clearly displayed to our audience every night. I had numbers on hand of audience sizes and numbers performances to back up my claim that this would be useful advertising for Coca-Cola.

 A couple side notes. After the rest of the set had been dulled down and dirtied to make it look more real and used, the bright clean colors of the coke cooler were overly distracting. The director asked if I could dull it down in any way. The solution I found to darken the color, without damaging the piece, was to gaff tape a layer of dark brown tulle over the entire side of the machine. The gaff tape should remove without leaving a residue, and the thin creases wrinkles in the fabric blend perfectly into the side of the machine from just a few steps away.

The only other problem we had with putting the machine onstage was the noise. The sound of the refrigerator motor, on our hollow set, in the marble floored theatre was just too much. The machine is rigged so that the lights and the refrigerator are run together on the same plug. 

Our lighting designer was able to solve the problem by installing long LED strips inside the machine and running them independently (this also allowed her to have more control over the lights and run them off the dimmer system). 

Never be Afraid to Ask...Branches

For this spring's production of Brother's of the Dust at Congo Square theatre, the designer wanted two trees on the set. They weren't terribly large, about ten feet tall each. I know there are other technicians who will argue with me about this, but I decided to use real branches to make my trees.

Side Note: I have heard stories about problems with moss, dry rot, bugs etc and know people who refuse to use real branches for something like this. In my experience though, there is no good way to make a fake tree look real. My policy is just to be extra careful with what I bring into the theatre. 


There are some places where locating several large branches that I can take, cut, bend and twist into trees would be as simple as walking outside the back door of the theatre. In the middle of Chicago though, large branches can be harder to come by.

While props shopping for the show I drove past an empty corner lot with a pile of large branches in the center of it; exactly what I needed! I pulled over and called the number on the large sign on the chain link fence. I explained to the woman who answered the phone who I was and what I needed. She spoke briefly to her boss and then told me that I was welcome to whatever I needed. I could untwist the wire holding the gate together and walk right in as long as I closed the gate when I was done.

I drove home, grabbed my cordless Ryobi circle saw, went back to the abandoned lot and collected my branches.

When I installed the branches onstage I had a bit of trouble because they were dryer and more brittle than fresh cut branches (which often bend easily and can be secured in place with a screw). But I was able to reattach the branch to itself where I needed to and add other pieces and sticks in where it was looking bare. I hot glued a small amount of leaves onto the tops of the trees to finish them off and it ended up working perfectly.

Never be Afraid to Ask...Neon bar Sign

Another last minute prop added to a show was a neon, Schlitz bar sign for Always Patsy Cline. In my initial conversation with the director I had asked if he wanted anything like this to help signify the transition for kitchen to bar, and he didn't think he did. After some rehearsal though, he decided that is would be fun, and just the extra touch we needed. Unfortunately that left me without an extended period of time to lurk on ebay to find a good deal. I looked into some "buy it now" options, but they were all pretty far out of our budget.

The stage manager mentioned he could get us one on rental from a theatre he worked with, but in the end, once we multiplied the per-week rental by the length of our run, it would have been almost the cost of buying one.

Eventually it dawned on me that I already had the connection I needed to get a sign. One of my very best friends works for one of the biggest beer distributors in Chicago. He had mentioned, while we were hanging out draining Schlitz bottles for show props (it's a hard life), that Schlitz was one of their beers. I called him up, told him what I needed, and he left me a sign on my front porch the next morning. We were able to use the sign free of charge as long as we didn't damage it. It worked out great! Free advertising for Schlitz and a free beautiful piece of set decoration for us.

Never be Afraid to Ask...Malt Glasses

When I was working in central Pennsylvania, props shopping was much more difficult than it is in Chicago. Shopping selections were limited, some of the most basic stores were an hour away, and there were very few other theatres in the area that I could count on as sources.
On top of all this, we had incredibly short rehearsal periods. If I knew of an unusual prop ahead of time I could plan to order it online and have it delivered,but if something was added late in the process I was often left scrambling. Unfortunately this happened quite a bit, both because I was a new props master and was not as skilled at predicting what might come up, and because, with shows rehearsing for a maximum of three weeks, anything added after the first week of rehearsal was already cutting it close.
One such scrambling incident involved old fashioned malt glasses. The director decided they would be just the thing he needed about 5 days before the show opened. I searched all of my usual sources and called everyone I could think of, but I was getting nowhere. Then one night, after coming home from work, I was sitting watching TV and happened to see a Red Robin commercial (my coworkers and I went to the nearby Red Robin pretty regularly), and it dawned on me that Red Robin serves their shakes in the exact old fashioned malt glasses I needed.
The next day I drove to the Red Robin in the early afternoon (when asking for something at a restaurant always try to go during a downtime, after the lunch rush and before the dinner crowd). I asked to see a manager, explained that I needed the glasses for our production and asked if it would be at all possible to purchase four of them. He went into the back, brought out a box of glasses and offered to sell them to me for $5 a piece. Done! It was the first time I had used this method, but is the source of a rule I now use regularly when brainstorming sources; "Remember, places that sell things are not the only places where you can buy things".

vines, and Sleeping Beauty's bed

This is a very overdue post about the bed from Sleeping Beauty. The show wanted to be very natural and yet magical, the director talked about it having a "Narnia" or "Midsummer Night's Dream" feel.

I needed to build some sort of bed for sleeping beauty to be laying in when she is woken by the kiss and I decided it would be really cool if it was created out of natural branches and vines. I built the frame for the bed out of oak dowel rods (I didn't trust found branches to be strong enough for this part) and then used found braches for all the cross bracing. None of the cross bracing pieces is incredibly thick (the widest was probably a 2" diameter) but by using so many pieces at so many angles the bed frame became incredibly sturdy. 

The vines were created out of some camo-colored climbing rope I bought at Home Depot. This rope was rated for up to 100 pounds and since I was weaving it so closely together I knew no part of the rope would be taking near that amount of stress. PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE if you are going to do anything like this be sure that the rope you use is rated. If it does not list how much of a load it can handle and you intend it to hold a person, it is not good enough rope. It doesn't matter how short an amount of time the person is on it, or how low to the ground they are, when safety is involved the better rope is ALWAYS worth the investment.

To make the rope look more natural I purchased a tub of liquid latex, tinted it green and painted the rope with it. The latex hid the weave of the rope, and gave the rope a more natural texture. When painting I made a conscious decision not to be particularly careful with how I laid the rope out on the tarp. This worked great because once the rope was dry, and I pulled apart the pieces that had dried stuck together, I was left with some very natural, interesting texture. 

Once the rope was dry I dusted it with brown spray paint (the green I used was far too bright) and wove it around my frame. The latex also helped to create some friction against the frame and allow me to wrap the vines much tighter. The fabric forming the alternate weave is actually some burlap ribbon I picked up at Michaels. I had never seen this stuff before but happened across it while working on this project and it seemed perfect. 

I tied some jute lashing around the joints to hide my screws, wove some dried grass in on the corners and the bed was complete. 

On a side note, this project would have been much easier if I had been able to work on it three weeks later. Good branches are hard to fine when you are wading through snow to get to them. Three weeks later as everything thawed and people started their spring yard work, the branches were everywhere. 

Full Monty Car

There is a car onstage in the Full Monty. The designer didn't want a fake car or a cutout. I went to the junk yard. I am constantly surprised by how nice people can be, and how eager they are to help with my ridiculous requests. The man at the junk yard drove us around in a van with no doors, taking us car to car until we found the one we wanted. We agreed on a price, and then the junk yard cleared everything out of the car for us (everything under the hood, all fuel lines, everything in the back seat...), and had it ready when our tow truck, belonging to a friend of the theatre, arrived.
Once we got the car back to the theatre we needed to cut it down so we had only what we needed. What you see in the image is what there was. We cut the car just behind the drivers door, and then lengthwise at about 5' from the drivers side. We masked the open sides of the car with deuvateen. The car was then installed onto a 4x8 platform (with extra framing) and set with knife guides into the tracks on the stage.
Lessons learned- We should have had them remove the windshield as well; if you do not have the proper tools removing a windshield is a long, painful, sticky tar mess. The hood will not support itself; we had to weld an extra bit of frame to support the passenger's side before we did the lengthwise cut. A sawzal will do the rest of the cutting, but it takes time and we ruined/bent/dulled about 6 blades in the process so budget for that.