The prop room, revisited

Six years ago, I made my living room into a rehearsal studio. I stripped everything except two couches at the far end for observers. With pinewood floors and cathedral windows, it was perfect for 2-to-4-person scenes.

"Raachul," said Leonid Anismov, the Russian master theatre director, sitting on the couch in the moonlight, gesturing at the empty space. "What more do you need?" He meant, for a theatre; to do your work.

Three years later, I got a housemate and stopped rehearsing at home. The room stayed empty, then transmuted back into a livingroom for a while. And then it became, innocuously at first... the place where theatre things went.

- Twelve gleaming red 3-foot dowels ("sticks") from Medea.
- Six silver sticks, a stabbed mantle, an unstabbed mantle, and a box of costumes from Caesar.
- Two iron swords, a curved Korean sword, and a broken rapier.
- A heavy glass water bowl for spiritual rituals.
- An iron candelabra, taller than a man, holding three green leafy plants.
- A shorter candelabra with a fourth leafy plant.
- Stretching 14-feet in the air, the delicate tracery of the dead branches from Macbeth.
- Two dark wooden Chinese rice-boxes, several bright cushions, Tibetan altar bowls, and two suitcases of reference books from Nanda Devi, along with several left-behind scripts, Sal's vest, a coat everyone thought was ours but wasn't, two vases, a box of markers, and four lengths of raw silk.
- A brown fabric wall-hanging from Doors.
- Five successive revisions of the Noir script.
- A small pile of books from Theatre du Soleil, most of them in French and a year later still unopened, even the new one by Peter Brook.
- Those four Maeve Binchy books that get read over and over, and a sprawl of old black-and-yellow Darkover and Dorsai novels, Ace and Daw editions cover-priced at $2.25.
- A black art portfolio, a larger one, and one so big it must be wedged up under the armpit, its single handle set at arms-length down its front.
- And behind them all, Rodney's computer, keyboard, and monitor, perched on the window seat, waiting to be turned on.

The couches have crept their way forward to intimacy with the TV. And behind them -- well, it's the prop room. No, a prop room would have shelves, and be organized, and you'd actually plan to USE the heavy Korean sword for something other than just making cool swishing noises in the air and frightening yourself to death.

Oh -- and let it be said, this is all my crap. My housemate is immaculate.

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[More thoughts, the next day]

So, why did I reveal all that? Most of you will never see my house.

I woke up this morning realizing -- it's because that room bugs me. That's the first one getting cleaned up.