Props to the Props Team

SCR Props Supervisor Chris Baab preferred to look at the monumental task in front of him in a variety of ways.

When the roof collapsed over a quarter of the theatre’s Production Center the night of Jan. 26, a broken pipe sent water gushing into the paint studio and storage areas. Luckily, the damage to the actual props themselves were minimal. Out of approximately 50,000 individual items, steamer trunks that were featured in last summer’s Outside SCR production of The Old Man and The Old Moon were largely the only things damaged and unsalvageable. The props for SCR’s annual production of A Christmas Carol were not damaged.

And there was a pleasant consequence.

“In spite of this tragedy, it did give us the opportunity to go through 25 years of props that I inherited from my predecessors,” said Baab, who oversees the construction, maintenance, storage and procurement of every prop you see on SCR’s stages. “In the process of triaging everything, part of what I did was decide what objects didn’t need to be held onto. It also gave me an opportunity to learn what types of props we had in surplus and what we lacked.

“… By removing everything from our storage area, it gives me the opportunity to eventually replace the shelving with safer, more structural shelving and organize things more in a way that makes sense.”

That, however, must wait. Because along with that triage came a puzzle lacking a solution. It took them about a day to survey the damage and figure out how many of those individual items needed to move to an off-site storage area in Garden Grove. It took them two weeks to figure out what to leave on site in 12 sea containers.

“In keeping those props on site, I had to pre-plan for the next half season of shows and hope I kept the right furniture, hand props, dishware—anything that we would put on stage that we try not to buy on a show-to-show basis,” he said. “I had to decide what props I had to hold onto for the next half season of shows, based solely on the show’s title.”

Baab said approximately 90 percent of the props were trucked to Garden Grove and they will be largely inaccessible. That facility is run by a subcontractor to Knight Restoration, the company overseeing the clean-up process, and Baab said that facility resembles the final scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark “and even more”—a massive warehouse of boxes upon crates upon more boxes and crates with little identification as to what’s inside each one.

“This is their warehouse. If we need something, we’d have to be very specific and they’d have to pick it up for us,” he explained. “It’s hard to tell them to ‘Find that brass urn.’”

For now, the essential items sit secured outside SCR’s Production Center, which is located about 2 ½ miles from the theatre. The 18,000-square foot facility houses not only the theatre’s paint shop and props, but also houses storage for upwards of 100,000 hanging costume garments—most of which were saved and shipped to another off-site facility.

Along with Baab’s and his staff’s dedicated efforts, plenty of work remains restoring the Production Center, finding space for our scenic artists to paint our sets, and supporting the restoration of the storage space needed for those props and costumes. Your support can help the recovery process at this critical time.