I spoke with Prop Agenda's Eric Hart recently, and the third part of our interview about the life and work of the prop master follows below!
Angela Mitchell: What's your biggest secret for finding the perfect props (and props resources)?
Eric Hart: I don't know if there is really a secret; it's more about figuring out where you would find certain items. Like, if you go out to Pennsylvania or Ohio, you can find wagon wheels and other farm-type implements, which, if you look for them in New York City, you're only going to find overpriced "rustic" antique versions.
Angela Mitchell: Right.
Eric Hart: So it's mostly about considering the origins of whatever you are trying to find. When I was first trying to find spray paint for leather, I couldn't find it in any of the hardware stores or fabric suppliers. I finally came across it in a shoe repair shop. Of course that makes sense now, but at the time, it seemed like a great revelation.
Angela Mitchell: That's a good one. Speaking of which, what's the toughest "simple" prop to create, in your opinion?
Eric Hart: I've been discovering how tricky it is to make dead animals.
Angela Mitchell: I loved your "fake pheasant" post recently on this, on the Public Theater's production of King Lear.
Eric Hart: They end up looking either like stiff taxidermy or like cute stuffed toys. It's so hard to find that balance, and it's even harder because most of us have no experience with what a dead animal actually looks like, and what it moves like when you carry it. It's something you always have to make. And any kind of preserved animal, like taxidermy, is going to be either stiff or mummified.
Besides dead animals, I've always found chairs to be a particular challenge. Not so much in creating them, just in the fact that directors and designers always seem to have this ideal chair in their head for the play, and nothing you can find in reality is ever quite right. You never realize just how much variety there is in chairs, or how much the little details can make a difference in a chair's appearance until you look at every chair on the Northeastern United States and still can't find the exact right one. They always seem to end up being a compromise.
