Tag Archives: prop master

Features, Jobs

Prop Master vs. Props Director

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What is the difference between a property master and a properties director? There is some contention in the props world and theatre world at large as to the correct name to call the head of props. Some feel “props master” is a traditional term that will soon be phased out. I posit that the two terms are actually distinct and can be used to more accurately describe the different roles and jobs available in the props world.

A properties director is in charge of a props shop and oversees the artisans, shoppers, and other employees. A prop master is in charge of providing props for a show.

I’ve written before about my theory as to why we use the term “prop master”. The term prop master seems to have gradually replaced the more-dated term “property man“. The earliest known occurrence of the term “property man” was in 1749, while the term “property master” was seen as early as 1831. Interestingly though, the term “property man” has persisted all the way through the 1970s (and beyond), though in later years it was used more to describe one who worked in the props department, rather than as the head of one.

The default name for the head of props is “prop master”. “Properties Director” is a much newer term, designed to describe the head of a discrete department on par with electrics, sound, or scenery. While the momentum of tradition still causes some properties directors to be referred to as prop masters, a prop master is not necessarily a properties director. A properties director may be the props master for all the shows in a season. But in a company that does a multitude of work in a number of spaces, the properties director may hire additional props masters for some of the shows.

As an example, here at the Public Theater, Jay Duckworth is the head of the properties department. He is what some would consider the “properties director” (though due to tradition, his official job title remains “property master”). As part of his job, he is the prop master on the mainstage shows. We have a series of productions called the PublicLAB, which are smaller-budgeted, but still fully-produced, new plays that are not part of the mainstage season. We hire an additional person for each of these shows to be the prop master. This person does not become head of the department, nor does Jay cease to be in charge. Thus you can see why the distinction is important; in the Public Theatre prop department, Jay is the properties director even when he is not the prop master on the current show, and additional prop masters can be hired without altering the hierarchy of the department.

The duties of a props director are best described in “The Properties Directors Handbook” by Sandra Strawn, which I’ve linked to on the side of this website since the beginning. One of the better guides to being a prop master can be found in The Prop Master: A Guidebook for Successful Theatrical Prop Management by Amy Mussman. You will notice that there is a large amount of overlap in these two guides. Indeed, the prop master for a large Broadway show will have more employees and managerial duties than the properties director at a small regional theatre. The distinction is not meant to be a hierarchical one (ie, to imply that being a properties director is a step up in the career ladder). Rather, the distinction is neccesary to clarify the job duties of whomever is hired.

It’s like the difference between a claw hammer and a ball peen hammer. Neither is better than the other, and in most cases they can accomplish the same task. However, for the tasks which each was specifically designed, you will find subtle differences that make them perform better than the other.

As a final note, I don’t really care for the term “properties manager”. In some cases, especially academia, giving someone the title of “director” automatically places them in a different salary range. It’s a totally arbitrary bureaucratic reason. Regardless, the term “property manager” is more commonly used in real estate, and so it is confusing to use a similar term, especially when a more distinct one already exists. Second, when an organization lists a job posting for a “property manager”, you have no idea what the position actually is. Usually, the job they are describing is more akin to a props run crew supervisor (a distinct job in its own right) rather than a prop master or properties director.

It is vital that the correct job titles be more consistently used in order for people with the correct skills and career goals to find these jobs (and vice versa).

Features

Challenges in making props lists for Shakespeare

When faced with a new production, the second thing a props master does (after reading the play once) is read the play again and make note of all the props. I’ve written about how to read a script and make a props list before. If you’re doing Shakespeare though, it presents itself with several challenges in this method.

First is the problem with the stage directions. In modern plays, the stage directions give a large number of clues. In Shakespeare’s plays, the stage directions are more suspect. Modern Shakespeare scholars understand that finding the “definitive” version of many of his plays is a problem that may never be solved. Theories exist that some versions are pirated copies from an audience member who transcribed the play during a performance. Other theories suggest that actors wrote down their own parts from memory and compiled them into a single version. In any case, the versions we perform today are merely the “best guess” of what was originally performed. The stage directions themselves were probably added by a later editor based on the stage manager’s notes of what was originally performed.

In Titus Andronicus in Act III, Scene 1, we see the stage direction:

[Enter a Messenger, with two heads and a hand]

Some directors treat Shakespeare’s text as sacred as modern playwrights’ and will ask for two heads and a hand in the props list. Others, recognizing that the stage directions are less authorial and possibly even a corruption of the original work, will either keep, change, or omit the stage directions on a scene-by-scene basis depending on what works best for the production.

What this means is that the initial props list you generate from your first reading (before meeting with the director, designer or stage managers) will have a lot of question marks:

Act/Scene character prop qty. notes
III.1 messenger heads 2 ?
III.1 messenger hand 1 ?

The second challenge in making a props list for Shakespeare’s plays is in how he layers rich visual imagery on top of the action of the scene. His metaphors often weave in and out of the reality on stage, making it difficult to know (and open to the interpretation of the director) what objects are used in a scene and which are merely mentioned by the character.

For instance, take Mercutio’s famous speech in Act I, Scene 4 of Romeo and Juliet:

O, then, I see Queen Mab hath been with you.

She is the fairies’ midwife, and she comes

In shape no bigger than an agate-stone

On the fore-finger of an alderman,

Drawn with a team of little atomies

Athwart men’s noses as they lie asleep;

Her wagon-spokes made of long spiders’ legs,

The cover of the wings of grasshoppers,

The traces of the smallest spider’s web,

The collars of the moonshine’s watery beams,

Her whip of cricket’s bone, the lash of film,

Her wagoner a small grey-coated gnat,

Not so big as a round little worm

Prick’d from the lazy finger of a maid;

Her chariot is an empty hazel-nut

Made by the joiner squirrel or old grub,

Time out o’ mind the fairies’ coachmakers.

Now, it would be silly of a prop master to add all these things -  a hazel-nut chariot, cricket’s bone whip, etc. – to the props list. However, there are plenty of passages throughout Shakespeare where it is far less obvious when a character is alluding to a real object on stage or merely waxing poetic. In many cases, it can be up to the director to make that decision.

The final challenge with propping a Shakespeare play is how widely different the interpretations of a single play can be. Hamlet can be played in Elizabethan Denmark, or modern-day Wall Street. It would be very embarrassing to bring an armload of rapiers to the first day of rehearsal if the director has set the play in Nazi Germany. It is vitally important to find out the setting and time period which your production will be set in before you begin generating a props list. Even then, you have no way of knowing what props they will want merely by reading the text.

Education

Fun Prop Quotes

Today, let me regale you with several quotes I’ve collected from mid-twentieth century books on props.

“One of the key jobs on any film set is that of the property master, and his range of activity is perhaps the largest of all. If it ‘moves, it’s mine,’ the prop man can say, on most occasions.”
People who Make Movies, by Theodore Taylor, 1967 (pg 76).

“In the property-maker’s room lives the wizard of the studio. He is always experimenting with new compositions with which to get the multitudinous effects that he is called on to supply. Latex, rubber solution, glues, Rhodoid, cellophane, resinous plastics, Perspex, and ingenuity – these are his materials. He is an inventor, a chemist, a bit of an artist, and an engineer.”
Designing for Films, by Edward Carrick, 1950 (pg. 106).

“The three basic types of properties are stage props, such as furniture, news desks, and lecterns; set dressings, such as pictures, draperies, and lamps, and hand props, which are items such as dishes, telephones, and typewriters actually handled by the talent.”
Television Production Handbook, 5th ed., by Herbert Zettl, 1992 (pg. 440).

“The most important part of any storage area is its retrieval efficiency. If you must search for hours to find the props to decorate your office set, even the most extensive prop collection is worth very little. Clearly label all storage areas, and then put the props and scenery back every time in the designated areas.”
Television Production Handbook, 4th ed., by Herbert Zettl, 1984 (pg. 28).

“As soon as the actors are free of books, important hand props (those handled a good deal by the actors) should be brought to rehearsal – or rehearsal substitutes provided – so actors can practise the use of them and save time at dress rehearsals.”
Directing for the Theatre, by Wieder David Sievers, 1965 (pg. 246).

Jobs, News, Useful Sites

S*P*A*M website relaunches

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S*P*A*M (The Society of Properties Artisan Managers) is a group of theatrical prop managers, directors, and educators throughout the United States. If there is a larger prop shop in a regional, non-profit, or university theater, chances are the prop master is a member of S*P*A*M.

Over the weekend, they relaunched their S*P*A*M website to include a lot of useful information about who they are and what they do. Readers of this site will be familiar with the Properties Director Handbook, which was written by Sandra Strawn (a member of S*P*A*M) and includes information and photographs from a variety of other S*P*A*M members. The PropPeople discussion forum is another resource that was initially set up by S*P*A*M members. And of course, yours truly is a member.

Of greatest interest for now is the list of props internships they provide. If you were interested in learning how to work in props through an internship, this is where you will find a shop. While there may be other companies who offer internships, you run the risk of working somewhere that uses interns as free labor and impart no educational value; working long hours for little pay in a theatrical setting is not the same as learning a craft. In addition, the companies in this list are the companies that are recognized throughout the country and will help you with future employment.

Reprints

The Property Department of an opera house in 1851

This article first appeared in The Critic, a London literary journal, in 1851.

A Peep into the Interior of an Opera House

The Property Department

The word “property” implies that vast variety of articles which, after the scene is placed and the actors are dressed, are still required to complete the picture. It is easier to name some of these things than further to define their general character. Among them are stage furniture – tables, chairs, sofas, ottomans, curtains, draperies, musical instruments (other than those used by the orchestral performers), flowers, vases, garlands, helments, swords, spears and shields, thrones and canopies, animals, jewel caskets, crowns, coronets, and sceptres, guns, halberds, wings and wands for fairies, altars, cabinets, goblets, banquetting boards, tombs, sledges, carriages, garden seats, chandeliers, banners, trophies, croziers, flags, mitres, candlesticks, beds, clocks, looking-glasses, lanterns, emblems, masks, palm branches for angels, and torches for devils. With such a specimen of the varieties, each of which is “a property,” some idea may be formed of the ingenuity, readiness, and industry which send up all these things when wanted, and a thousand others, from the bowels of the theatre itself. For nearly everything is manufactured on the spot. Descending through some labyrinthine passages, and below the level of the put, the explorer finds a series of apartments where day does not seem to come, but where eternal gas more than supplies its place, and where – under the superintendence of the most talented of property masters, Mr. Bradwell – a body of workers male and female, are engaged in making and ornamenting these articles, renovating old ones, and transforming them from one fashion to another, or skillfully carving, and gilding, and painting new and fresh ones. The scene, as may be imagined, is extraordinary, from the miscellaneous character of the manufacture. For while some of the objects are substantial and real, others are but imitations. A chair or a sofa, for example, is solid and steady – which is well, for Signor Lablache may chance to sit upon it – whereas the spear of the angel, or the pickaxe of the peasant, which is to be wielded by some young lady in the wings or a jacket, as the case may be, is of some light wood, with silver paper counterfeiting steel, or a little dark paint affecting to look like iron. There is, of course, a separation in the labour, but to the unaccustomed eye there is a series of visions of gold, shavings, bright colour, carpenters’ benches, diamond stars, tenpenny nails, goblets of rosy wine, and unmistakeable gluepots. But it requires a more intimate inspection of the work, and a comprehension of its heterogeneous character, to do justice to the extraordinary ability of the property master. When a new opera or ballet is to be produced, he makes out, very early in its history, a list of everything which can possibly be wanted upon the stage, and he is responsible for the scenes lacking nothing when the curtain rises.

Originally printed in The Critic, London Literary Journal. Volume 10, Published by J. Crockford, 1851 (pg. 183)