The Department of Dead Things

If you think about it (and I do – maybe too much), it takes a lot of dead things to make live theater. I’m not referring to all the trees we dispatch for our lumber, production notes, custom newspapers and magazines, or the seemingly endless reams of paper that roll out of the Stage Management office. I’m talking about the things we create in the Prop Shop to replicate things and persons no longer living. Dead bodies, disembodied heads and sacrificial barnyard animals – you get the idea. Almost every Prop Department in every major regional theater employs an artisan who numbers among their specialties the production of convincingly realistic dead stuff. We are fortunate to have two such people: Our Ladies of Superior Craftsmanship, Sarah and Anna.

Need proof? Well, I’m hoping you had the good fortune to enjoy our opening Quadracci Powerhouse Theater production, THE GOVERNMENT INSPECTOR. Among the props featured in those two acts of exquisitely garish décor and aggressive goofiness was a 12-foot square polar bear rug which spent the last scene of Act 1 and almost all of Act 2 staring the audience down from center stage. It sort of became the “pet prop” during technical rehearsals, with actors lounging on it and grooming it while they waited for the action to resume. As I’ve had to explain to a number of curious patrons as well as several of our staffers, No Bears Were Harmed in the Making of This Rug.

The body of the rug was fashioned from two enormous sheepskin rugs, one of which was a piece of stock originally purchased for our 2005/06 production of SUEÑO. The other we purchased to complete our bear and the Prop Gods smiled upon us in that – defying all odds – the hair colors on the two rugs actually matched. One of the requirements discussed with the director before rehearsals even began was that the head had to be particularly durable (read: Actor Proof), as it was likely to be lain on as well as stood upon. (We were unsurprised at this since our own Gerry Neugent was playing the lead character. No horizontal surface goes untraversed.) The intrepid Sarah headed straight for the catalog file (you wouldn’t believe some of the things we have in there) and in one of our taxidermy catalogs found the foam form for a grizzly bear head, as well as a set of teeth, some eyes and a tongue, all in lifelike plastic.

When the head form arrived, we realized two things. First off, though pretty darned massive, the grizzly head was still much too small for the scale of the body. And nobody likes a pinheaded polar bear. The second revelation was that, strange as this may seem, taxidermy bear head forms are not built to be jumped on. Go figure. The plan that we devised was to cover the head form with layer after layer of sprayable insulation foam, much like the stuff that you would buy to seal cracks around your doors and windows. By spraying the foam on and then letting it dry between layers, we created enough tiny air pockets so that when Sarah carved the final layer into a polar bear head’s shape, it had just enough spongy give to survive the rough treatment. Then Sarah upholstered the head with a fake fur that she trimmed and toned to match the rest of the body and there it was, a completely convincing giant polar bear rug with a hinged jaw suitable for hiding huge wads of rubles. (You know – like at home.)

The other non-living prop entity in THE GOVERNMENT INSPECTOR was the pair of fake hands that got slammed in a trap door which was then stood on, all accompanied by Torrey Hanson’s agonized screams. (Move over, Shemp.) This shameless business was invented during the first week of rehearsal. The bit was that Mr. Hanson was to start down a flight of stairs, pop back up to confirm instructions and at the conclusion of the exchange, Mr. Neugent was to slam the trap door just as Torrey’s head dipped clear but before his hands managed to escape. The audience was treated to the sight of a set of fingers trapped by the door that Mr. Neugent then walked across. Casting and Molding Ace Anna sprung into action, making detailed plaster casts of our carpenter Erik’s hands, which were chosen because they are roughly the size of catchers’ mitts. No chance the folks in the back of the house were going to miss this bit. Anna then made silicone negative molds of the hands and filled them with a liquid rubber-like substance in a flesh tone. While that was still in a liquid state, a pair of rods was introduced to serve as handles that would keep Torrey’s real hands well out of danger. When they came out of the molds, the hands were so detailed that you could actually see the fingerprints. With the help of our friends in the Costume Department, Anna attached a pair of sleeves that matched the costume and masked Torrey’s hands on the rods from the prying eyes of the folks in the balcony. Paint was added so the hands matched the be-smudged makeup on the actor. As an added bonus, when the heavy trap door fell on the hands, the resilient material of the fingers arched briefly upward, as if in a spasm of pain.

Over the years we’ve been called on to build a lot of dead stuff. RICHARD III had a dead body that had to contain a radio-controlled pump so it could bleed – and stop bleeding – on cue. Rubber trout with magnets in their mouths were caught by fishermen with steel hooks on their fishing rods in SOUNDING THE RIVER: HUCK FINN REVISITED. King Lear’s knights stopped by with a freshly killed wild boar as their dish to pass. A sacrificial rooster in THE NIGHT IS A CHILD and a rat that became Renfield’s afternoon snack in DRACULA both had to bleed when executed. (Yum.) Our beloved A CHRISTMAS CAROL features a deceased turkey as big as a little boy and a wrapped body that is dumped from a cart headlong into an eight foot deep pit. It took forever to get that head to sound right when it hit the timbers.

Perhaps the two most widely traveled members of the MRT Props Post Mortem Cavalcade are Mr. Humphrey Hoskins and Sylvia. Mr. Hoskins is widely known as the Hardest Working Dead Guy in Show Business. He was originally constructed for our production of ARSENIC AND OLD LACE, directed by our own Jim Pickering. We knew when we started working on the show that one of the major prop challenges was to construct two realistic dead bodies which would be hauled from place to place on stage, and that one of them was to be wrestled with. Now, I don’t know about you, but I’m good and tired of stage corpses that are so stiff that they look like we robbed the window at J.C. Penney or so limp that they act like rag dolls. So we set out to make a couple of fully articulated and realistic dead guys. The key, I figured, was in the natural movement of the limbs. So instead of the usual hinges or bolts used at the joints, I asked Erik to weld up joints that incorporated the universal joints from a socket wrench set so that the corpses had ball joints at the shoulders, hips and everywhere else that you and I have ball joints. We built a skeleton, fit it with its joints and padded it out with urethane foam and polyester batting to the physical proportions of a real person. The hands were cast rubber (thanks again, Erik), the face was cast from a life mask of one of that season’s acting interns, and our pals in the Hair and Makeup Department provided a wig. Costumes gave him a nice white shirt, a lovely hand-painted tie that looked like a Father’s Day gift gone bad and a natty pin-striped suit and wingtip shoes. In all honesty, I have to say that Mr. Hoskins dresses better than me. When picked up and moved about, Mr. Hoskins looks and moves like a dear departed uncle. As a matter of fact, when my wife and I went to see the show, we sat next to a woman who, following the scene in which Lee Ernst wrestled the corpse into submission (or was it the other way around?), insisted to her friend “Oh, that was a real actor.” Mission accomplished.

As it turned out, Mr. Hoskins gets more work than some real actors. We started a resume of the places he’s worked on his chest, and have had to continue it on his back. Among the places he’s plied his craft have been The Goodman in Chicago, Utah Shakespearean Festival and Houston’s Alley Theatre. Mr. Hoskins has been hanged, thrown out a window and tossed down a flight of stairs and he’s still convincingly dead. He’s traveled so much that Erik built him his own casket-shaped shipping crate. Last month he had a gig at Discovery World playing – guess what? – a dead body.

Sylvia is the deceased goat that we created for our production of Edward Albee’s THE GOAT OR, WHO IS SYLVIA? She is revealed at the end of the play, decapitated by a jealous rival, her head presented as a grisly trophy. Sylvia is one creepily realistic prop. Once again we employed a foam taxidermy form for the base material of the head, as well as taxidermy tongue and eyes. The skeleton of the body was fashioned from wood, steel rod and a heavy wire mesh. One of the team of artisans who worked on Sylvia had never actually seen a real goat up close (city kids . . .), so she took a field trip to a goat farm where she photographed a few likely models and matched up fake hair samples to their actual coats. Goat hair is pretty coarse, but as it happened the match for color and hair length we found was an off-white alpaca that was an almost perfect match for real goat hair. Hooves and nose were sculpted from plastic and the alpaca was tailored and hand-stitched onto the skeleton. The result was disturbingly realistic. And Sylvia’s reputation as an effective and well-crafted prop has spread throughout the national prop network over the years. This year alone she has appeared in five productions of her namesake play. If she was a union goat, we’re pretty sure that would make her eligible for Equity health benefits.

I asked Anna and Sarah why they thought that projects like these are favorites among Props Artisans. After some discussion, they decided that it is in large part because of the amount of naturalistic detail that is required to convince a close-up audience that what they’re looking at is real. What we’re producing looks genuine, not “theatrical.” This, I might add, is the kind of detail that artists and audience alike have come to expect from our Prop Department. Our Ladies of Superior Craftsmanship also like that they get to experiment with and manipulate new and different materials in order to achieve their effects, so there’s also the challenge of beating the learning curve on a tight schedule. Ultimately, though, they agreed that “we just like to fool people.” Good job, ladies.

James Guy, Properties Director

To view behind-the-scenes photos of The Rep’s Prop Department, click here.

Photo credits: Gerard Neugent in The Rep’s 2009/10 Quadracci Powerhouse Theater production of THE GOVERNMENT INSPECTOR. James Pickering in The Rep’s 2008/09 production of A CHRISTMAS CAROL. Joseph Hanreddy in The Rep’s 2004/05 Stiemke production of THE GOAT OR WHO IS SYLVIA? Photos by Jay Westhauser.