Don't Drink the Water

The other day my friend Carl asked his theater friends on Facebook to share the favorite props they’ve ever used in a show.

Ah, props.  My relationship with stage props is, well, complicated. All is copacetic when they are where they need to be and they work the way they are supposed to work.

 

My favorite props are ones that actually gave me something logical to do with my hands onstage. 
The tray I used as the Waitress in Working and my peacock feather fans that I used as Reverend Mother in Nunsense actually assisted this quintessential klutz (me) in performing big song-and dance numbers.  I was also extraordinarily fond of the teddy bear that I held on my lap the entire time I was playing Mrs. Savage in The Curious Savage- you have no idea how comforting it is to hold a teddy bear when you’re out there in front of all those people.  I wish all my characters could have had teddy bears.

In The Music Man, my character of Mrs. Paroo was supposed to knit.  I couldn’t knit.  While I had already taught myself to passably fake a thick Irish brogue for the part, it seemed unlikely that I could teach myself to knit.  Enter The Talented Mr. Rip who does knit and crochet (like a pro), and taught me a couple of stitches to use in the show to give Mrs. Paroo something to do while Marian sang.

Imaginary props can pose their own challenges, as I found out when I was cast as Mrs. Webb in Our Town, where the women pantomime cooking meals and tending to their families using invisible equipment with which I was unfamiliar.  “Mrs. Gibbs” and I took a field trip to the Heinz History Center to look at the kitchens of the time period of the play, and our ever-patient, saintly director gave us a tutorial on how to pretend to snap beans.

Sometimes, though, props can go horribly wrong.  I will never forget the moment in my VERY FIRST play when the phone I was supposed to answer did not ring.  I waited for a moment until I heard the stage manager off stage frantically whispering “RING, RING!!…RING, RING!!”  Brightly, I pronounced “Oh, there’s the phone!” and then proceeded to answer the silent phone.

By far, my worst prop mishap was when the character I played in an interesting, seldom-produced farce called Cheating Cheaters was a closet drinker who hid her booze in places like vases and watering cans and took swigs from them when no one else was around.  On the first performance of the second weekend of the show I grabbed the watering can at the appropriate time and took a huge swig of water that was…actually fermented.  The stage manager/theater director had not changed the water from the week before so the water I just drank had been sitting there in the hot barn for seven days.

Now it was my turn for some quick thinking because I had to drink from the same watering can later in the show.  I carried the can offstage with me when I exited, cleaned it out and filled it with some fresh water, all the while listening to the stage manager kvetch about how it was my own damn fault for not checking my props.  For the record, I did check that the watering can was where it needed to be.  I had not thought to check the water because I had trusted the stage manager to have freshened it as she had between every performance the prior weekend.  And people wonder why I have trust issues.

My plan was to put the can back on stage during intermission.  I was pretty smug and self-satisfied with my own presence of mind until I was back on stage and I realized that I would need the watering can before intermission and also before my character left the stage again.

I was thinking hard in between remembering my lines on stage, which was exhausting, but then inspiration hit.  I was going to have my character remember that she left her watering can in the “kitchen” just offstage, rush off to get it and bring it back onstage and take a big swig.  I did just that and it got a huge laugh from the audience.

It was one of my finest onstage “saves,” but I sure could have used that teddy bear to hold for the rest of that play.