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Yellowjackets' Jacket

posted by prop shop on Thu, Sep 4, 2008
in Prop shop

There have been a number of times in my prop career that I have had to come up with a “period” newspaper. And I have come up with several ways of doing these depending on the action or look of the scene. Approaching the play Yellowjackets, I knew that we had to make a completely realistic newspaper, because for a prop person, it’s a play about a newspaper (and, well, furniture that can move on and off stage quickly...!).

The newspapers come up in numerous scenes and in different formats. The actors make layouts of pages, have printed proofs, read from pages, and have stacks of these newspapers all as props.

We couldn’t get away with glued-together pages or faking a front page and filling the rest with some other newspaper. And there was no way we would individually print them knowing how many were used in the show, even though we can print large format on our plotter--it’s too time-consuming, too inaccurate, and would take too much ink to be an affordable option.

I was initially afraid that we would have to recreate all the articles from scratch, and actually talked to the Theatre's art director about fonts and vendors in case we had to do that. Even he was shocked we would take the time to make something so realistic, but this is the nature of what we do--we make things look real and effortless when really they take considerable time and skill to produce. Luckily Itamar Moses, the playwright, was able to give us a copy of The Berkeley High Jacket he had saved from his time at Berkeley High School.

One of our multi-talented prop artisans, Sarah Lowe, was able to scan his original and recreate the paper on the computer. She changed the cover pages and various articles to serve the text of the play. We ended up producing two separate and complete versions of the paper for the show, and used the printing press that the actual Jacket is printed on. We don’t always use outside vendors because of the nature of our job (things in prop-land tend to happen or change at the last minute), but Fricke Parks Press was phenomenal to work with. They were able to print the papers for us the week we started technical rehearsals for the show, and now we have enough fake newspapers to last the run of our production and beyond.

Above: Actor Craig Piaget reads one of the prop papers during rehearsal.

Below: Two of the final front pages designed for Yellowjackets.

All photos courtesy of brtpropshop