The Ladies of the Camellias images
Erica and Kelly built crates to carry Sra. Duse's theatrical effects. (Sra.—I could almost be English, I enjoy showing off foreign honorifics so much.) The Duse company, you'll recall, has gone on tour and fetched up in this Paris theater for a short stand; at the time of the action, a lot of the preparations are still not quite finished, so we see boxes and such scattered around the stage.
In what has become a Town & Gown tradition, props and set pieces we build with the intention of throwing them out after one show just keep reappearing. (The people at the landfill are probably still holding a spot for the 21-3/8 inch wide flat we built for Lettice, but our sets always seem to feature one 21-3/8 inch gap in a wall.) The bigger of these crates started out as a single-use seating unit from Six Degrees of Separation. Its mate got repainted as a sea chest for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead and will also feature in the new production; in fact if you hold your mouth just right you can see it behind the crates.
Allen did try to love the already built fireplace unit (from Santaland via Extremities—go back a couple of pages to view it), but in the end he just couldn't, so we are building a new one from a photo that Dina found on some auction site. Well, maybe "after" rather than "from," because we aren't producing an exact match at all. In the photo at left, we have the quite shallow main unit put together but not painted, and we've begun on the columns and buttresses and so forth. There will be a mantel on top, of course, and the tricolored area in the middle will become the firebox. Plenty of marble and froufrou. I'll make sure to get pix of the completed unit, which should look pretty good, at least from audience range.
It does no good to ask whether community theater could exist without PVC pipe. The big existential question is, would the effort be worthwhile if we couldn't use this marvelous stuff? The fireplace columns are remnants from the famous bollard in Rosencrantz. I imagine we'll add flutes.
Sure, this page is supposed to be about the set, but sometimes people intrude. Follow me closely here: The showoff actor Matt, playing the showoff actor Coquelin, playing the showoff Cyrano de Bergerac, can't make an entrance like everybody else. Matt has promised to study Errol Flynn in The Adventures of Robin Hood with extra care so that he can achieve a good effect (nonchalant, one-handed) by opening night; a month out, you might think him slightly apprehensive. But game, Matt's definitely game.
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