Every object tells a story: The unseen craft of theatrical props

Episode 37: Props Transcript

Julia Dixon Evans: When you think about props, what comes to mind? A folded newspaper, a coffee cup, Chekhov's gun? What's your definition of a prop? It's something Deb Hatch has been thinking about for 40 years.

Deb Hatch: A prop is if you move to a new place — apartment, house, whatever — everything that you bring with you that you're not wearing is a prop. So your pets, your food that you eat, your weapons that you have, if you have a fire in your fireplace, those are all props.

Evans: Props define us wherever you are right now, you're surrounded by them. As Deb explains this, she reaches for an old, faded coffee cup.

Hatch: I think, here's the thing: So everything in here is iconic, right?

This old mug. People visually attach meaning to objects, and that's what I do for a living.

Evans: Deb is the prop supervisor at San Diego's La Jolla Playhouse, the theater where many Broadway bound plays get their start. She's worked on more than 100 shows here, scouring eBay, thrift stores, Facebook Marketplace and even fake food manufacturers for the perfect objects to bring these plays to life.

Hatch: I remember buying prison toilets for "Jersey Boys." I found a prison supplier.

Evans: Every so often on The Finest, we'll take you to work with creative San Diegans, people doing fascinating jobs that keep San Diego's cultural scene running — sometimes without us even noticing. For example, you go see a play and on stage, an actor holds a pencil.

Hatch: Oh, well, where did the pencil come from? What year is it? Does it have an eraser? Is it a Ticonderoga #2? What do they do with it? Are they putting it on the desk? When they roll the desk up, is it gonna, do we have to flatten one side of it? Is it gonna roll off? Does the desk have a drawer? Like, this is about a pencil.

Evans: As we wander through Deb's prop wonderland — the playhouse's prop storage — she pointed out objects and furniture — both the everyday and extremely unexpected — from shows throughout her career.

Hatch: There's all those telephones from all the different eras.

Anthony Wallace: Wow.

Hatch: We've got, of course, our body parts section.

Evans: Wait!

Rummaging through that vast archive of scene-setting details gave us a new appreciation for the little things that surround us and define us: our own props. And it also gave us a glimpse into what transforms a script on the page into a show — something that ends up traveling the world and maybe even changing hearts and minds along the way.

From KPBS Public Media, this is The Finest, a podcast about the people, art and movements redefining culture in San Diego. I'm Julia Dixon Evans.

[Theme Music]

Evans: On a busy Monday morning producer Anthony and I met Deb at the La Jolla Playhouse offices. She's retiring this year after more than 20 years at the theater. She's been part of some legendary productions. One of her earliest shows in this role was the world premiere of a musical that would go on to become a household name: "Jersey Boys," the story of Frankie Valli and The Four Seasons.

[Music: "Big Girls Don't Cry" from "Jersey Boys"]

Hatch: And that was so ridiculously exciting. I remember thinking, who cares about The Four Seasons, right? Like I listen to Cat Stevens.

But going to that reading, I get goosebumps when I still remember it because I was like, oh my gosh, I think this is something.

Evans: La Jolla Playhouse primarily develops and produces new works of theater, plays and musicals that haven't had their first full production anywhere else. In those cases, Deb and the rest of the crew starts with a blank slate, with no previous productions to reference. And "Jersey Boys called for a mix of objects that were iconic…

[Music: "Can't Take My Eyes off You" from "Jersey Boys"]

Hatch: The musical instruments and the picks.

Evans: … precarious…

Hatch: We had these rolling car seats.

Evans: … and a little dangerous.

Hatch: There's a gun moment in that show, I don't know if you recall it.

Evans: Many shows that get their start at La Jolla Playhouse have high hopes for big things after. It doesn't always happen, but when it does — like it did with "Jersey Boys" — the props Deb helped design sometimes go along for the ride.

Hatch: Anything that the producers paid for will go on a truck. So all of those props went to Broadway. That was the first time that I ever experienced that and man was that heady. And I remember years later, a couple years later when when they did the tour and it came to the Civic, they invited us down. So, when I was watching it, I was like, oh my gosh, that's that table that was over in the warehouse. And there's been so many iterations of that stuff now. It's like, oh my gosh, that yellow kitchen table. I guess it's a classic now.

[Music: "December, 1963 (Oh, What a Night)" from "Jersey Boys"]

Evans: Deb's own theater journey began on a stage much smaller than anything on Broadway.

Hatch: I'm from a small town in northern Minnesota, population 4,000. So I remember we had this, my father built homes and he sold them to this family from California, and she was this very dramatic woman. And she took a role in the local theater production of "Scheherazade," and I got to tag along and that was it. I was like, oh my gosh, there's people moving stuff around. I wanna do that. Somebody went and got that, I wanna do that. So it hit me early. Started doing theater in college and didn't think I could make a living. And I made this vow, and I stick with this today, I made this vow when I moved to Minneapolis. I'm like, if I can't make a living doing theater, I'm gonna give it up forever. And that was what, 40 years ago, so.

Evans: One of her first gigs even had a connection to one of Minnesota's most famous residents.

Hatch: Started doing freelance stuff, did some music videos that were Prince-adjacent. So…

Evans: Wait, wait…

Hatch: Yeah.

Evans: Wow. Prince-adjacent.

Hatch: It was bands that he was producing. So Alexander O'Neal, The Jets. I met my dearest friend doing theater production and then she's like, hey, I'll give you $25 if you bring me some diner stuff to this address. So I did, and then I ended up art directing videos. It was all very fast and loose then, and it was just so much fun.

[Music: "Innocent" by Alexander O'Neal]

Evans: In 1988, she got a summer job at the La Jolla Playhouse.

Hatch: So "80 Days" was my first show here. And I carved elephants for it. It was amazing. And I was like, oh, it blew my mind like what a dream to do a gigantic musical. And so I was kind of sucked in.

Evans: As a single mom, she lugged her young family around the country working at different theaters before eventually landing back at La Jolla Playhouse full-time. Of the many shows she's worked on here, 23 of them went on to Broadway. But Deb's process begins the same way for any show.

Hatch: I read the script with my little highlighter. And you'll be reading through it and you have to read the stage directions or what they're saying. Let's down, oh.

Evans: There's chairs.

Hatch: Where are we? Oh yeah, there's chairs. There's a log. There's something, a bench, I don't know. So that's what I'm looking for.

Evans: And not just any chair will do.

Hatch: There's a lot of factors that go into a chair. So what time period it is, what style is it? How wealthy are they? Props inform the character almost as much as the costume does anyway. So that's the beauty of props.

I love the research. I'm crazy about it. I do deep dives. I go down all kinds of, I watch movies. Yeah, I love it.

Evans: Every prop has to be accurate and add visual flare and personality to the show, but they also have to be practical. In live theater, there are no retakes. But sometimes the best laid plans can go awry.

Hatch: There was a bar on stage. They had this actor, his character was very flamboyant, dressed as a soldier all the time, wore his sword all the time. And there was a scene in the pub where this woman comes in, my baby, my baby. She puts the baby on the bar. He comes in, he is swashbuckling around the stage. His sword catches the crocheted baby blanket. And so he dragged the baby prop around the stage for 10 minutes. We're like, oh my god, he doesn't realize he's dragging the baby.

Evans: One of the most iconic recent shows Deb worked on required some creative problem solving. "The Outsiders," which went on to win four Tony Awards, had a lot of dancing on top of cars.

Hatch: Mostly I remember getting those cars. I found the Ford Falcon on Facebook Marketplace. It was this guy out in La Mesa somewhere, and I said, hey, I wanna buy your Ford Falcon. It was $2,000 or something. He goes, he goes, you know, it doesn't have a motor. And I'm like, perfect, because we have to take them out anyway. So we sent a flatbed truck over there. And then of course, the games began because the whole thing had to be reinforced, 'cause I don't know if you've ever jumped on the hood of a car, but it doesn't go well. So all of that is reinforced, with, you know, tubing and steel and, and everything. So, yeah, that was fun.

[Music: "Run, Run Brother" from "The Outsiders"]

Evans: And that motorless car from La Mesa made its own journey to Broadway.

One show with its future still on the line is "The Recipe," about Julia Child's early career and rise to fame. It premiered just a few months ago. Producer Anthony and I both saw it, paying close attention to the kitchen sets, midcentury pots and pans and, of course, the food. Up next, Deb takes us backstage for a closer look at what some of that fake food actually is. Stay with us.

[Music]

Evans: Can you tell us where we are right now?

Hatch: Oh, well, we're backstage in the stairwell of the Potiker Theater.

Evans: It's a short walk from the offices to the theater. And suddenly we're transported from a world of cubicles and spreadsheets to the lights and curtains of the stage. It's hard to not feel a spark of magic.

Hatch: So here we are backstage right. The props are set up to be ready to go out on stage. You can see that these noodles are rubber bands.

Evans: Look at these glasses. I was struck by the delicious-looking cocktails in this play.

Hatch: Oh, good.

Wallace: Yes, I wanted the noodles from where I was sitting.

Hatch: Did you? Delicious rubber bands.

Evans: When you think of fake food, maybe a shiny plastic fruit at an open house or a wooden pizza in a kid's play kitchen. But Deb says fake food technology has come a long way, and "The Recipe" had plenty of it: bundles of chives, sprigs of thyme, a bowl full of garlic. Some of it was manufactured, but much of it is still handmade in-house — pure arts and craft style.

Hatch: Like this shallot is made out of a wooden egg, and there's some jute on there. I think she probably used some fabric maybe, some modge podge to make these shallots. This is rice, which is actually just plastic filler for a beanbag chair.

Wallace: Wow.

Hatch: This butter is upholstery foam.

Wallace: That looks like butter.

Hatch: It does. And it's not greasy.

Evans: Food, of course, is generally timeless, but the props still have to signal a specific era to the audience.

Hatch: You know, if you have a telephone in a show, you can pretty much tell what year it is, what decade it is, anyway so…

Evans: She points to a rotary phone on "The Recipe" set.

Hatch: So you can tell we are not now, this is not now, immediately.

Evans: For larger items, finding the perfect piece in a thrift store or online can be difficult or too expensive. Then it becomes a full-on construction project. We stepped onto the stage and under the lights sat Julia Child's stove. It appeared to be a vintage enameled, freestanding oven.

Hatch: So this is completely made of wood.

Wallace: This doesn't look like wood, even from two feet away.

Hatch: Beautifully painted, right?

Evans: This is where we started noticing the extreme level of detail. It's stuff even the most hawkeyed audience member might not make out. At one point in the play, Julia Child is furiously typing pages for what will eventually become her classic cookbook, "The Art of French Cooking."

And in the pages on stage…

Hatch: Most of them have actual content on them. Try to be careful taking some passages from the book. Some of it's nonsense…

Evans: These details written into books and paper props build a sense of authenticity.

Hatch: So what is in the newspaper? What is on the page? What is in the letter?

Evans: For a later emotional moment on stage, the playhouse needed a bunch of copies of Julia Child's finished book. Of course, it had to be the first edition.

Hatch: Surprisingly, it's always these things that I think are gonna be super easy and then they're really hard. Like I was like, I'll just buy "The Art of French Cooking." That'll be no big deal, right? Like incredibly difficult to find copies of this book that we could afford. Let me just say that I, it was so expensive that I made a deal with philanthropy that they would pay for four of them if we would have the actors sign them at the end of the run and give them to the donors. So we worked it out.

Evans: Further backstage there were more kitchen islands tracing the development of Julia Child's home kitchen with racks of copper pots and pans and baskets of fake food. Even up close, it all felt so real.

Wallace: Made me kind of hungry, all that fake food. It's a testament to the realism.

Evans: I know. I just wanna take a bite outta one of those sesame rolls.

Hatch: So we're headed into the warehouse.

Evans: Props storage is a massive lofted building housing thousands of props from past productions. It's usually Deb's first stop when beginning a new play to see if anything can be reused or repurposed. This is their collection, the stuff that the theater owns. Fun fact: The word prop is short for theatrical properties. The warehouse feels part over stuffed garage, part magic funhouse, with shelves full of furniture, historical treasures and some oddities and curiosities, and dozens of variations of any one thing. This was probably our favorite stop on the tour and we could have spent all day browsing.

Hatch: Here's our chair room.

Evans: That's a lot of chairs.

Hatch: I think there's something like 700 chairs in here, and yet I have to buy chairs for every show. Go figure.

Evans: Like the beach chairs?

Hatch: Yeah.

Wallace: Yeah, it's a whole beach chair collection.

Evans: Upstairs is the smaller stuff. All carefully organized.

Hatch: Look at all our typewriters.

Wallace: Wow. Video game stuff. Laptops.

Hatch: Right?

Wallace: From the ages.

Evans: Yes.

Wallace: iPads and tablets.

Hatch: Remember that?

Evans: We reminisced at the not-so-recent-technology artifacts like Walkmans and answering machines, even Anthony's old iPod dock and alarm clock combo. And plenty of ephemera that mark a place and time.

Oh, foreign currency. So like money is extremely specific.

Hatch: It really is.

Evans: Cigarettes.

Hatch: Drug stuff. That's a good one.

Evans: Drug stuff.

Some of the [labels caught us off guard.

Wallace: There's a container for severed heads in sacks. And then bloody severed heads in sacks.

Hatch: Well, there's a difference.

Evans: La Jolla Playhouse has about 100 full-time staff and about a handful of them are dedicated to props. If you're listening and thinking this sounds like a pretty great job, Deb says it's a good time for it.

Hatch: I always encourage people to think about props. Say you like to research stuff, which is what I like to do, you can be a designer. Zlatko designed the printing press for "3 Summers of Lincoln," designed and built it out of wood. I don't wanna ever discourage anyone from becoming a set designer, but your odds of working are really pretty low. You can have a lot of work in props.

Evans: And maybe props are especially important now.

Do you feel like there's something about live theater and like tangible handmade objects that is like people are turning to it in a different way now that the things that we see in videos or on our screens are sometimes not even real?

Hatch: Yeah. Everybody's worried about AI.

Evans: Yeah.

Hatch: Yeah. Well, I think there's nothing like the theatrical experience, right? Like there's no such thing as the same show because the audience changes. So every audience is seeing a show that's never been done before, right? You know, if the audience is engaged, it's wildly exciting.

Evans: That kind of experience leaves an impression.

Hatch: I think you can present ideas in the theater that people can chew on. Maybe you hadn't thought of it that way before.

Evans: At La Jolla Playhouse, Deb has helped bring some powerful stories to life.

Hatch: "Here There Are Blueberries." Oh my gosh, how incredibly moving? It was so hard to sit through that tech every night.

Evans: "Here There Are Blueberries" premiered at La Jolla Playhouse in 2022. It tells the true story of a 2007 discovery by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, a set of photographs taken at Auschwitz. They don't show the violence we expect. Instead, each photo reveals everyday life of the Nazi staff doing paperwork, relaxing and posing for photos. And in one, a group of young women are shown eating blueberries.

Hatch: The way like your brain explodes going, oh my gosh, those were, a lot of those people were just regular people. Like they somehow believed what they were being fed about a group of people, and they participated.

Evans: The actual historic photos were projected on screen, but the photo album the actors handled on stage, Deb's team recreated it to look just like the real one down to the tiniest details.

Hatch: So it was an exact replica of what they did have, and I think that's important. It's important to the actors and it's important to us. I think the audience can feel it, whether they know that, that that's an exact replica or not, it doesn't matter. It's the intention behind it. So it all feeds into the theatrical experience I think.

Evans: Each of the thousands of props Deb and her team have sourced on eBay or ingeniously built from scratch, they've helped deliver shows that have had a real impact on audiences, even those that didn't end up manifesting the cradle to Broadway dream. La Jolla Playhouse is a massive shop with the luxury of a vast prop warehouse and in-house builders. But this work is happening at all scales, from high school musicals to small community theaters and beyond. Live theater gets under the skin of those who experience it, and even in small ways that can make a difference. That magical finished product, with every object carefully chosen from vintage cars down to the smallest pencil, is the result of an enormous amount of unseen work. And with retirement looming, that's the part Deb says she'll miss the most.

Hatch: It's the process for me. I almost, it's not that I don't care about the end, but it's the process in the middle, like how exciting it is. Like how much do I stay up late at night thinking about how we're gonna figure that out, you know? Is Zlatko involved? Is Rai excited? Are we all excited? Do I get to run up to costumes and talk to them about we have to put this thing in your pocket? Is the pocket big enough? Yes. All that is very exciting. I think what I'm gonna miss is solving problems, but I also kind of just wanna go to the zoo every day.

[Music]

Evans: A special thanks to Deb Hatch and the La Jolla Playhouse for their help with this episode. And thank you so much for listening. If this episode resonated with you, please subscribe, leave a rating or comment. It makes a real difference and helps stories like these reach more people.

The Finest is a production of KPBS Public Media in San Diego. I'm your host, Julia Dixon Evans. Our producer is Anthony Wallace, who also composed the score. Ben Redlawsk is our engineer, and Chrissy Nguyen is our editor. This episode was written and researched by Anthony and me.

This transcript has been edited for clarity and conciseness.