Props

I’m sure you all know by now that I started hanging out with a community theater here in town and got a chance to do some fun theater stuff over the last 6 months or so. So I was really looking forward to helping out with their fall show. Unlike their other shows, this one is being performed in a museum. So the space is cramped and tiny compared to a real theater.

I said I’d be happy to help with whatever they need behind the scenes, so this time they put me on props. I’ve come to find out that working on props is totally different from costumes or acting in that costumes and acting are both fun and props is horrifying.

This week is tech week, so I’ve been there every night for the last few nights for full run-throughs of the show. I’m working with a woman named Joann (all names have been changed), which is great because she’s very fun and mellow and I had a great time working with her on costumes last time. Joann is the props mistress, which is a job that usually goes to Betty, but Betty was going to have surgery during the run of the show, so she declined props this time. Now it turns out that Betty isn’t going to have surgery, so she is back in props, but she’s not running props. She’s just crew. Betty is a chihuahua in a septuagenarian’s body.

Last night was the second run-through of tech week and Joann couldn’t be there, so the props department was just Betty and me. And I don’t have any idea what to do. I have been helping as best I can throughout rehearsals, but it has become clear to me that a person who routinely loses her purse and her keys should not be on props crew. I have no idea how I’m going to do this.

At one point Marla, the stage manager who is a lesbian whether she knows it or not, came into the props room, which is actually a large coat closet.  She said that because we are directly in back of the stage and there is a door that opens from the stage and into the hallway in front of our props room, we could not have the light on in the props room. We must do props in the dark. She said we could have flashlights to see what we’re doing and she sent Jerry, the lighting guy, in with a single blue light to illuminate the area. But we still could hardly see. Now I have never done props before and I don’t have any idea what I should expect, but it did seem a bit unreasonable to ask that we do props by flashlight. But she told me four or five times that we MUST HAVE THE LIGHT OFF. It is a necessity.

Marla left and two minutes later, Betty walked into our room and turned on the light. I said, “Marla was just here and she said the light has to be off.” Betty grabbed the door, closed it, and said, “We can’t work like this, it’s ridiculous. Look. If we just close the door, no light gets out. Forget Marla. This is fine. Let’s get to work.” And she turned me back to our business of searching through a plastic bin filled with plates to try to find the one plate we need for the scene.

But the problem with Betty’s plan was that with the door closed, we couldn’t hear the actors on the stage and we didn’t know when the scene was over. So soon enough, Marla yelled, “PROPS! WE NEED PROPS!” and in our rush to get out the door and onto the stage to change the scene, we forgot that the light was on and we opened the props room door and light spilled into the hall and everyone saw the light. Two minutes after we set the stage, Marla was back in the props closet yelling, “Lisa! It is absolutely necessary that this light remain off! I’m serious!” Luckily Betty was there that time, so I gave Marla a shrug and pointed at Betty and like that Marla and Betty were nose to nose, shouting at each other. “I need light to work!” “We can’t have light in the hallway!” “We can keep the door closed!” “No, you can’t!” The problem did get solved (kind of) when Jerry brought in a few more blue lights, but by then I was cowering in a corner having flashbacks to my parents’ screaming matches circa 1977.

So after Marla left and we went back to setting up the props, Betty turned to me and said, “You know, they’re all crazy and tense, but we just can’t let that bother us. This is rehearsal. And I’ll tell you, if it stays like this, I will just take some Tylenol before I come in and all of this will roll off me.” That sounded like an excellent idea to me if I could replace the Tylenol with heroin.

It was downhill from there. I lost props. I put the wrong ones out. I missed my cues. I made mistake after mistake, and every single person there, I am sure, down to the last one, thought I was an idiot. Partly it was because I wasn’t on top of it, but it was also because the conditions were impossible. I won’t bore you with more of the details and stories—as much as I’d like to—but I will say that one of the things we are being asked to do is to stop doing props at various points throughout the play, run up to the sound booth to say a few lines as a character on the other end of a telephone call, and then run back down to the props room to resume our duties.

In the middle of Act 2 Scene 3, I turned to Betty, slightly teary, and said, “I think I’m just bad at props.” She grasped me by the shoulders, looked right into my eyes, and said, “No. Listen. Here’s the thing: Props is the hardest thing to do and on top of that we are at the bottom of the totem pole. That’s just the way we’re treated.” It was truly the worst pep talk I have ever received.

At some point, my urge to flee the building subsided and I resigned myself to whatever was going to happen. And I made it through. But that was just the second night of tech rehearsal and it was the most stressful thing I have been through in a long, long time. How am I going to get through a performance?