It is highly likely that I have the only back yard in Tarrant County, possibly in all of Texas, with an 11-foot tall guillotine in the yard. There is also a buckboard wagon, a lobster trap, and a pump in the yard. In the garage is a cradle, in the house is a bar, now used for my art supplies. All were made for various theatrical productions in the area. It has been great fun to build them, all from scratch, so I thought I would show off a few pictures of things that I have made for theatre. Some of the murals I have painted on theatre walls as part of sets for various other plays will be in the next post.
One not pictured here that I did was an old style ladder with dowel rungs I made for The Miracle Worker . I aged it and made it look like it had been sitting in a barn for years. I had originally made it 8 feet long, but we had to cut off a foot of it to get it through the stage entrances. When the theatre had to vacate the costume and set storage area of the theatre by order of the fire marshall, the ladder was one of the things that got thrown out. I was in an antique store about a month after the ladder got thrown out, and there was my ladder -- advertised as a “Vintage 7 foot ladder’ -- and on sale for $110.00. I laughed long and hard over that one. I guess I did pretty good work at aging it, for it to be worthy of being sold as an antique.
The 11-foot tall 7/8 scale guillotine was made for The Scarlet Pimpernel at Artisan Center theatre in Hurst in 2006. It has a real steel blade, which falls very quickly and makes a wicked nasty sound. But it is theatrical special effects, designed by me and enhanced by Christopher, and is perfectly safe. We had 2 people put their necks in it every performance, and they survived to do the show the next night. Wax images of the actor’s heads were made, so on stage they actually pulled their heads out of the basket. It is missing a piece of the lower yoke, which was made of foam rubber. The actor in the guillotine pushed his neck down on the foam so it looked liked his head actually got chopped off. Very nice special effect.
The Buckboard Wagon started out life as the Wells Fargo Wagon for the Artisan Center Theatre Production of The Music Man in 2008. Unfortunately I have no pictures of that iteration, but it had a canvas canopy over it with Wells Fargo Express painted on the sides. However, the wagon was modified to appear in the Plaza Theatre Company production of Smoke on the Mountain in Cleburne, TX, also in 2008. That version of it is pictured below. The wheels were borrowed from Chris White’s father. The box in the front of the wagon is a tool box, hand-made in about 1910 by Almer Ernst Libby, a great uncle of mine. The wagon does have a steering mechanism and is functional. It is about 9 feet long.
Up next are a bar, made for the 2008 Artisan production of The Foreigner, a cradle and a working, movable pump made for the 2007 Artisan production of The Miracle Worker, and an old-style lobster trap, made for set dressing for the 2008 Stolen Shakespeare guild production of The Merry Wives of Windsor. Notice the weathering/aging effects on the pump housing and the lobster trap. It was fresh wood when I started. On the pump housing, you can see a replacement piece of cedar (the first top plank on the left) which is fresh wood. The wood in the pump housing and the lobster trap was aged with india ink diluted in water. My own invention -- and it works great. If you look at the cedar fence in the background, which is truly weathered, you can’t tell the difference. You can also compare the two aged pieces with the raw wood of the cradle, and you see how well my aging method works.
And the last of the set pieces is the trolley for Meet Me in St. Louis at the Artisan Theatre. It was 7 feet tall and in three pieces so that it could be easily stored off stage and so that it could come on stage easily from the corners. It was nicely detailed with decorative trim and advertisements from the early 1900’s. My favorite part of it were the old fashioned candle powered carriage lamps I put on either end, which I manufactured completely from scratch. The three pieces gave a really good impression of a full trolley car when on stage and packed with townspeople. Well into building the trolley I got called upon to be the trolley driver in the show, so it was fun working with the piece I had built on stage
