Prop Agenda: We recently opened “And Then There Were None” at Triad Stage in Greensboro, NC. Agatha Christie’s classic murder mystery takes place in 1930’s England in a sleek, unique seaside home. Robin Vest’s scenic design gave us a sparse, Art Deco-inspired interior populated with a few trappings of a world traveler.
3 comments:
I really enjoyed reading this article and hearing about the process used to design and create props in order for them to be both functional and for them to fit into the world of the show. In my experience, props have the ability to make or break a show. The most common thing I have seen is with cups or things that are supposed to have weight but clearly do not because it is not always feasible to have liquids where there should be. If an actor is not able to carry an empty cup as though it is a full one, it immediately draws my attention away from the action of a performance and, instead, I can only focus on how the actor is “drinking” from a clearly empty cup. As such, I really enjoyed reading about the amount of care that this props master puts into each element of set decoration; even if sconces seem like they would be insignificant, each detail is important.
The craftsmanship of the sconces that Eric made is insanely good. I love the way he used so many different materials and reused parts of other things in order to create the desired look. It takes a great amount of ingenuity and knowledge to be able to see these different parts and create something so far from what they were originally intended to be. He does it so incredibly well too, and the realism really helps it look like the “sleek, unique seaside home” he was going for. I’ve always loved watching other people’s processes of building things and seeing how they come together. It helps me to understand more about how things work together and ways to troubleshoot my own creations. I know from experience that getting certain things can get really expensive, and that sometimes taking a different route and using things that aren’t made for this specific purpose can work out just as well, maybe even better if you factor in the cost, or the weight. It’s a lot of what we do in theatre, like Kevin said in Production Science yesterday, “We are the bastard child of a hundred different industries.”
I’ve always enjoyed the Art Deco aesthetic. I think that unlike many other aesthetics from history, it relies less on the past and more on creating its’ own image than say Neo-greek or Neo-roman. Here, it’s especially interesting to see the process of creating a fixture such as this which has a historical basis, but has to have a very modern function, especially on stage. It’s especially interesting to see an item like this created from the start to interact with DMX input and input from a light board, instead of an existing item being engineered to work with DMX and a light board. Some of the decisions that this designer made are also interesting, such as ignoring traditional incandescent fixtures and using plastic and LEDs instead. While it does look good, I do believe that a traditional incandescent and glass fixture would have been more effective and more accurate in an art deco aesthetic. I do understand that these are much more difficult to make, and more difficult to come by.
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