Meat Dome

Today I learned that this...

is called a "meat dome" which is why my searches for "covered silver tray" and other variations of those terms, were coming up empty.

I also learned that they are VERY expensive, and I will be making one instead of purchasing one.

"Period appropriate" is relative

This last, overdue, post on A Tale of Two Cities at Lifeline Theatre is in not about anything I made. All of this glassware was purchased or pulled from stock.

The interesting challenge here was that the show took place in so many different locations. The disparities between those with money and without is also a huge theme in the show. I needed to have people drinking wine in four different scenes, in four different locations. 

Starting with the richest character in the richest setting, I used cut glass (meant to look like crystal) for the Marquis St Evremonde. Glasses like these would have been a more recent innovation at the time of the show, and only the rich would have owned it. 

One step below the Marquis, would be the Mannettes. I was thrilled to find these etched glasses at a local rental shop. They almost exactly matched some antique period glasses I had in my research. The ones at the time would have been a thicker glass, and not as perfectly matched (as they would have been hand-blown). Not as nice as the crystal, but solidly upper middle-class. 

Next came glasses at the English pub. I wanted to convey that this was a fairly nice place, but logically could not image any pub at the time using hand blown glass wine glasses. That would be far to expensive to purchase in bulk, in a place where they are likely to get broken. I knew found the right balance when I found these glasses made of brown glazed ceramic.  

And finally, the lowest class glasses would have been in the Defarge wine shop. They sold cheap wine to the poorest villagers in their suburb of Paris. The glasses in that shop only needed to be functional, cheap, and easy to replace. These clay mugs were the perfect solution. 

Working through these different wine glasses served as a good reminder of the importance of research. It can be very easy, especially when working on shows set further in the past, to find one or two images research images and move on; "That is what wine glasses looked like in 1790." But class, region and wealth also need to be factored in. 

Plastic Champagne Flutes

In Hamlet at Notre Dame Shakespeare this past summer we needed a large number of champagne flutes for a party scene. I didn't have much money to spend on the prop, and had previously decided with the director that we would do our best to avoid putting any glass onstage in this show (there was so much stage combat that anything glass was guaranteed to break). We found a selection of plastic flutes that fit our look at Party City, quickly discovered that the cheap plastic was far too light. When the actors were holding the flutes in their hands we had no problems, but sitting on a table or on a waiter's tray it only took a slight breeze to send them all tumbling. 

To solve the problem of glassing falling (and then breaking), we needed to weight the bases of each glass. I had my assistant fill the small cavity at the bottom of each glass with silicone caulk. We pressed a large heavy washer into the caulk and then filled the base the rest of the way. We smoothed out the caulk so that the glass would sit flat on a surface and let it dry. 

You can see here that the inner layer of caulk stayed cloudy long after the outer layer had dried and become transparent. Fortunately this wasn't a problem for my purposes. 

 We carefully taped over the bottom bit of the bell of the glass, and then spray painted the stem silver. 

 Then repeated several dozen times

 Once the tape was removed we had a set of silver stemmed champagne flutes that were safely plastic, light to carry on a large tray, nicely weighted to not tip over, and less than $1 each. 

Disappearing Dinner

The first scene in Hunger at Lifeline Theatre takes place at a fancy anniversary dinner. It is supposed to appear as if a lavish meal has just been completed. Unfortunately the entire setup needs to disappear in seconds. leaving only the desk beneath it, and only one actor is available to strike it. 

To accomplish this I started by cutting three pieces of lauan to match the size of the table top. I taped the lauan together along the seams creating hinges. Then, from the underside up, I screwed all of the flat dished to the lauan.

 This first picture is of the table as it appears during the scene.

 Then the scene ends, the actor striking the dinner moves all of the tall pieces (wine glasses and bottle, 2 stacked dessert dishes) to the center of the table, leaving only flat pieces on the sides.

 From there, all the actor needs to do is lift up the two large side pieces and everything folds together to be neatly carried offstage.

Only one of the flat dishes ever holds any real food. I chose this small light dish for the "last bite of cake" that is consumed during the scene. So that this dish could be removed and washed by stage management , this plate is attached with Velcro instead of being screwed down. 

Russian painted tray

Sometimes the trickiest props are ones that no one else even notices. In Hunger at Lifeline Theatre, I was having trouble figuring out what to do about a small tray that was needed to carry a bowl of soup and a roll. Nothing I could find seemed right.

In any other situation I would probably have used a wooded tray to give the impression I wanted, but several scenes earlier we see the characters burning books in order to stay warm. I couldn't justify to myself that these scientists wold be burning books and would have left a wooden tray intact. All of the silver metal trays I found in stock though seems much too cold and formal. 

I realized what the answer was when I stumbled across this old tray at an antique store. Of course, the tray should be a beautiful old Russian painted tray (also the show is set in Russia).

I couldn't afford to buy this tray (or any authentic Russian tray) on my budget, but I took this closer photo of the painting at the antique store and resolved to do it myself.

I started by painting a stock silver tray black. Then I used a small brush to add a base layer of color mimicking some of the strokes I saw in my research photo.

A second coat of paint in different colors gave my flowers a bit more dimension. 

Then add some distance, and a bowl covering part of the plate and you have a very convincing fake antique. More importantly it fits into the mood of the scene without being visually or conceptually distracting.

No one else ever mentioned my tray (or even noticed it I think), but often that is the entire point. 

Quick fancy glasses

These glasses were also for The Double at Babes with Blades. I needed lots of rocks glasses for the bar scene and wanted them to be a bit unique and special (as a reference, the play is based around a lot of classic hollywood and we had decided that we wanted the props to all look a bit "proppy").

The director picked out some glasses with a silver rim from some of the research images I sent her. I didn't have the money to go buy nice cut-glass rocks glasses, so instead I altered some that I found for about $1 a glass at Marshalls.

For the silver stripes I used aluminum foil tape I purchased at Home Depot (you can see this roll was only $6.58 and it's a 50 ft roll). 

I trimmed the tape to the width I needed using my x-acto knife to cut along the edge of my metal ruler. 

Then I carefully smoothed the tape onto each glass. Aluminum is an incredibly soft metal, so wrinkles and creases smooth out fairly easily (at least until they are small enough that they are hard to see from any distance). Also the tape is used for sealing HVAC systems, among many other industrial uses, so the adhesive  will stand up to low temperatures and condensation, both of which are issues that would have come up with putting cold liquids into a glass. 

And there they are. Cheap, easy bar glasses that have a little something special about them.