Giving 'em their props

Gathering a plethora of odd and ends for item-heavy comedy proves challenging for theater crew

Lisa Bornstein, Rocky Mountain News

Published September 27, 2007 at midnight

Text size

More Theater

Robin Lu Payne has spent decades as a prop designer, which may have helped prepare her for the challenge of You Can't Take It With You.

The 1930s Kaufman and Hart comedy is heavy on the props, and with a staff of five, it was up to Payne, the properties director of Denver Center Theatre Company, to bring together anything that wasn't a wall or a floor.

"It's a story of an eclectic family that collects stuff and they don't know what to do with it, so they set it down in a corner and it stays there," Payne says.

To fill the stage, Payne went to the theater company's unmarked warehouse in the Elyria neighborhood, where decades' worth of sofas, lamps and telephones fill 15,000 square feet to the ceiling.

There she finds the life-size crucifix from Jesus Hates Me, lying horizontally in bubble wrap. Nearby is a harpsichord used in Amadeus. Two caskets, one of glass. Six vintage bikes. And dozens of guns.

"The guns that are in here are nonworking guns," Payne says. "I have four safes back at the office of (working) rifles and handguns."

An entire room is lined with lamps encompassing a century of styles, accompanied by a millennium of candlesticks. A trash can is filled with fake cacti, sitting near a full-size fake elk. Another room holds fake food, restaurant checks, entire shelves of bread.

By early September, Payne has pulled - or her crew has built - most of the props for You Can't Take It With You so that the cast can use them in rehearsal. But she's still on a quest.

"I'm looking for a bicarbonate of soda bottle," she says. "It could take all day."

Moments later, she has her hands on a bottle of Bromo-Seltzer.

"It's not very period," she says, "but we'll fix it. We're lucky in 1938 they had screw-tops."

You Can't Take It With You

• When and where: 6:30 p.m. Mondays-Thursdays, 7:30 p.m. Fridays-Saturdays, 1:30 p.m. Sundays, Stage Theatre, Denver Performing Arts Complex, Speer Boulevard and Arapahoe Street

• Cost: $31 to $48

• Information: 303-893-4100

Lisa Bornstein is the theater critic. bornsteinl@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-954-5101

Subscribe to the Rocky Mountain News