The monkey made me do it

theah-TAH

I'd never been a big fan of live theater. In junior high, my only exposure was being dragged along with a friend to see the "Phantom of the Opera" and I found it to be overly emotional and manipulative (and the "rock" song with synth background?! Still gives me shudders). High school brought a slightly greater interest (hello, actor boyfriend), but though I liked acting in and producing plays I still didn't watch hardly any. Of course living in a small town with few options other than the community version of "Oklahoma" may have helped out with that. I saw a few operas, a few musicals, and acted in a bunch of things, but nothing too life-changing and certainly nothing that would foreshadow spending five years of my post-graduation life working in the largest producing theater in Seattle.

College for me was a four-year attempt to find a way to make a viable living creating art. I explored television production, set design (big art!), theater design, and ultimately gave up entirely on the prospect and almost took a job as a journalist for an online tech paper. I was taking as many art classes as my schedule could handle, designing random shows left and right to get my creative fix, but theater designers almost have to be artistic gypsies with their constant travel and wearing of many brightly-colored scarves. Also, finger-cymbals. I came out of college with a long list of things I had ruled out as careers and a big empty space under "What do you want to be when you grow up?". My scenic design professor was a highly excitable little gypsy who was a big supporter of mine and completely understood why I couldn't do scenic design as a career. He had come to Seattle years ago and still had a contact in the theater world, and got me an interview for an internship with the props department. I had no idea what would be involved - I had never done props before (only scenic painting and some carpentry) and showed up for my first day wearing clothing that made anything other than a tour out of the question. I didn't know! I wore a nice shirt and slacks, everyone else was in jeans and well-worn t-shirts and covered in dust and paint. My uniform for the next five years, that.

"Props" is a job that has no actual job description. It is what you can do, or learn to do, or fake being able to accomplish. They will ask you to build anything and everything, and the more experience you have going into it, the better (though how one can possibly be experienced in building an upright string bass AND wiring a chandelier AND making realistic-looking fake marzipan - all of which I have actually done - is questionable). I had a little knowledge of tools, had a lot of skill with sculpture and carving, and painting experience. By the end of my first year I could plumb a bathroom, knew how sails were rigged (in miniature), had built my first set of living room furniture, and learned chip carving (such a lovely Nordic art form). Over the years I learned how to weld, upholster, build anything and everything (or fake it well), paint really fast, and use more tools than anyone should possibly need to know. Landlords love me.

The best projects that I can remember:

* Carving a roasted stuffed baby pig (slightly burnt and steaming) - the research for this one was disgusting, also when I had to carve squirrels roasted on a spit. ewww.

* Making a 7-foot-tall "stone" horse sculpture that the actor sat on and was wheeled on stage riding. I also painted the actor and his costume to look stone-ish. The audience gasped when he moved, it was great.

* Making marijuana plants to be subtly placed around the edge of some on stage landscaping. My coworkers kept coming by and giving advice to make it more realistic, followed by a "umm... I saw it on a movie one time, that's how I know."

* Carving 3 giant vases - one 7' 0", one 5' 6", one 4' ish - in the parking lot of the theater on an 8' long custom-built lathe. I wore a full Tyvek suit, gloves, scarf on my head, mask and goggles, but still ended every day with the full-body version of feeling of sand in my swimsuit. We had to make custom lathe tools as well, 4' long and steel, and a bench for short lil' me to stand on so I could reach the whole contraption. I looked like I was conducting a robotic exploding foam-clouded symphony in a spacesuit. Crowds gathered and oohed.

* Drawing Shakespearean-era head shot equivalents for a farce. This is hard - portraits in a medieval poofy-sleeved style with enough sass so they're still funny? Yikes. I added lots of feathers in their hats and hoped it worked for them.

* Making commemorative Franklin Mint-style plates of O.J. and Nicole Simpson (in a heart), a dying Rwandan woman, Chernobyl, and the falling of the Berlin Wall. It was some sort of cultural commentary, making a big '60's-style statement. I had fun with it (they didn't really give me too many constraints or guidance, just said to do something shocking). They ended up liking them a lot in the end - it's good to work for hippies sometimes!

* Creating a glowing magical staff for Prospero in the Tempest, using a napkin drawing from the designer of a squiggle and the words "magic, glow" scrawled by it. I made a huge jewel with a sparkling light inside, controlled by a switch hidden in the strange vines that swirled up the staff and held the jewel in place. The whole thing was painted to look iridescent and slightly metallic and looked great, but when we got into production the designer decided to use black light for an overall theme, and I had to repaint it so it glowed like a pubescent raver. I was a little sad.

* Painting murals all over the production shop during our down times, including a shrine to Ralph Wiggum ("Spray paint tastes like candy"), a James Dean portrait, and a scene of a man in a bathtub (from his viewpoint) showing his foot poking up out of the water next to a small '50's style TV reading "you deserve booty."

posted by LadyJay @ 1:26 PM