News

It’s Props Month at Stage Directions

By Eric Hart | Published: February 8, 2010
This month’s issue of Stage Directions has a special section on props. One of the articles, “Prop Shop Confidential” by Lisa Mulcahy, is about maintaining a props stock. This is a good companion to my own post on which props to keep and which to trash; it features a lot more thoughts on how to [...]
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E-Cigarettes

By Eric Hart | Published: January 22, 2010
So your play needs cigarettes. Aaaah. In most venues by now, real cigarette smoking is viewed as the next plague. The fear is that lighting a single cigarette for a few seconds in a large, well-ventilated theater, is worse than the constant outpouring of pollution from 250 million cars, 600 coal power plants, and every [...]
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Original Stargate SG-1 Props

By Eric Hart | Published: December 16, 2009
Another blog has pointed me to The Prop Store of London, which has started selling a selection of props from Stargate SG-1. They actually have props from hundreds of films, but if you’re more interested in those, you are strange and uninteresting. Many of the props have wonderful detail shots as well. This specific device [...]
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27 Visual Theatre Cliches

By Eric Hart | Published: October 16, 2009
Though this is almost a month old, I’ve been wanting to get around to it. In Time Out London, Andrew Haydon has made a list of cliches of visual theatre that should be banned (The article has since disappeared from their website). He posits that these metaphorical objects and devices are so overused, that they’ve [...]
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Kathy Fabian

By Eric Hart | Published: September 14, 2009
Kathy Fabian has been a fixture in the Broadway props world for a few years now. In the past few years, she’s propped shows such as South Pacific, Spring Awakening, and You’re Welcome America. She is also the resident props master at the Bay Street Theatre in Sag Harbor. Last year, Tom Isler wrote a [...]
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  • About

    Eric Hart

    I am Eric Hart, the assistant props master at the Public Theater in New York City, and a longtime prop maker.

    This site is a way to share my work and the things I've learned over the years. It's also a way to connect with other prop makers, props masters, and artisans, as well as a collection of all things of interest to props people from around the internet.

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