Props Thoughts - #4

Creating specific items for characters - I mentioned this in a previous post. I really enjoy this aspect of design. A glass is called for. Well, what kind of glass? A low-ball, something to drink scotch out of. Great, I have one of those right here. Done, right? Well, no. Not done. Sure, any glass of the right size could do, but that doesn't make it the right glass. Even something as simple as a glass can say so much about a character and the location they're in. From cut crystal down to acrylic, the range of what could be the right glass is pretty large.

When I designed props for Dead Man's Cell Phone the "which glass is the right one" issue meant something not just about the character or location, but also the tone of the play, the world the play lives in. There were several references in the stage notes about a scene looking like/feeling like an Edward Hopper painting, and the director wanted to really capture this. This is a wonderful place to start from with a design - artwork for great visuals and how the scene should feel. I knew I wanted to have coffee cups that were a bit oversize, because of how much weight they needed to carry in the scene. They're such an iconic part of Hopper's work, that they needed to make a statement. Any coffee cup could have done from a functional point of view, but the form demanded a specific cup. And it's the designer's job to identify the difference, and endeavor to deliver the specific. You need to work with the director to fit into their concept, the scene designer to fit into their set and often times with the actor to know what sort of character they're creating.

That's actually one of my favorite things to do, bringing an actor in on the discussion. In I Have Before Me a Remarkable Document Given to Me by a Young Lady From Rwanda there is, unsurprisingly, a remarkable document. The young lady mentioned in the title has written out her story and brought it to a writer for his feedback in helping to get it published. The director, actress and I talked a lot about what this document should look like. The young lady was a refugee, had no money, and was very serious about her work. The document should therefore be handwritten, on whatever kinds of paper she could get, and kept as tidily as possible. I ended up pulling loose-leaf paper, ends of notebooks, different colors, different sizes, some with spiral frayed ends, some from legal pads, just collecting any variety of paper I could for free. I found the cheapest, plainest and yet sturdiest folder that would be big enough to hold the whole stack (some 7 inches by the end) at the local drugstore, and found a large rubber band to hold it all together. I tried to approach it as I believed the character would. I sorted and stacked and tried to make all the pages feel as if someone had spent time writing on each page individually. I did not, however, write individually on each page. I'm not that insane. For practicality's sake, I spray glued all but the top 4 or 5 sheets together, and then bound them in the folder so that even if dropped, they wouldn't go spilling everywhere. I did hand write the first 4 or 5 pages, so that the actor who had to look through it could have something to respond to, using the Wikipedia article on Rwanda as material. In the end, it felt like a real item. Something I could imagine that young lady putting in her bag, carrying on a bus, and presenting to someone she hoped would help her publish.

Finding or creating the right item is important, I think, not just to help the audience believe the world that we're presenting them with, but to help actors believe it, too. Actors absolutely adore props, and anything that helps them feel connected in the moment is appreciated. Like handwriting out pages, or making sure that if they have to read something from a page or book that the actual words are written out clearly and correctly. Anything that keeps them from disconnecting from the scene. For that same show, the writer character is shown packing up some of his published books of poetry, and he reads off several titles as he does. So I created book jackets for each of those books with the titles he reads. Sure, I could have just pulled any books of the right size, trusting that the audience would never see the titles, but it's jarring to the actor to have to say one thing when reading another. As an even smaller detail I knew no one but the actor would see, I copied his headshot from the theater's website and stuck it on the back cover with the author's blurb. He loved that detail, and it became clear that something so small helped make him feel like those actually were his books. He was able to connect to the props in a more direct way.