The theatre bug first bit me sometime in late elementary school when I saw some of my friends in a Halifax County Little Theatre production of Honk! I then participated in a regional summer theatre program in elementary and middle school and the drama forensics team in middle school. In high school, I didn’t jump into the theatre program until my sophomore year due to my hectic extracurricular schedule, but it was the best experience I had in high school. I acted in The Crucible, Disney’s High School Musical: On Stage, and Pride & Prejudice, and I was part of the crew for the one-act competition team my senior year. After college, I got involved with Halifax County Little Theatre, first on stage, but then as a member of the Board of Directors. Everything I know about theatre I owe to Becky Donner and the other members of HCLT.
Grad school put theatre (and all other hobbies) on the back burner for a while. When I moved to Rome, I knew I wanted to get involved in theatre again. During long-distance, Garner and I enjoyed several Rome Little Theatre shows, and one of our friends, Katie, is an active volunteer with RLT. I reached out to her over the summer about ways to get involved, and she asked me to work on props for a show she was producing, Morningside!
The setting for Morningside is the Driscoll family home in the Morningside neighborhood of Atlanta, and the play takes place during a baby shower. While I won’t give away the plot, nine women attend this baby shower from hell (think Steel Magnolias meets The Real Housewives of ATL), so part of the work I did on props was getting items for the party, including a diaper cake and prop food.
Since the show ran two weekends, we needed to figure out how to make the Southern staple of deviled eggs hold up for two weeks. Enter Pinterest and Google. The director, Jessica, found a recipe for fake deviled eggs made from cake and frosting. Thankfully, the actors did not eat them on stage, so I did not have to keep making batches of these eggs, but they were as hard as a rock at the end of the show! I used some of the same cake mix to make the fake mini quiches as well.
The two trickiest props were two items that had to break each show – a teddy bear and a rustic pottery vase. The teddy bear a.k.a. “Cuddle Bear” took some thinking, but once I figured out how to take the limbs off and add some velcro to them, Cuddle Bear dismembered with ease!
The vase, a.ka. the “Judith Jane,” was much more labor-intensive. Often, if a script calls for a prop to break, productions will get special breakaway pieces that break safely. Usually, productions will get one breakaway piece for each showtime. However, our prop budget was only $350 and most breakaway vases run $60 a pop. Katie thankfully found a video of a DIY vase that could break and be put back together. My garden shears, some jewelry magnets, painter’s tape, and acrylic paint turned two plastic pots from Home Depot into a vase that was supposed to be made by “some penniless women in Appalachia” that sold for over a thousand at an art auction. Of course, after each time it broke (and sometimes into more pieces – thanks, Clancy) I had to reassemble and repaint for the next show.
It was so wonderful to be part of a show again and be back in a theater. While it can be such a time-consuming effort, there is nothing quite like being on a stage or in the wings during a production, working with a cast and crew to bring a story to life on stage. One thing that was so special about Morningside is that the entire cast, running crew, and production team were all-female; this show was a celebration of women all the way around!
I’m so excited to hear what shows RLT will do for next season, and in the meantime, I’m looking forward to seeing the Wizard of Oz come to life in May!
Emily Martin Cochran 