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What actors really drink onstage

posted by Karen McKevitt on Wed, Mar 9, 2011
in At the theatre , Backstage buzz , Our shows

After reading Megan Wygant’s post on the microwave haiku, Production Assistant Megan McClintock was inspired to delve a little further on what it takes backstage to accommodate a “food show” like Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, or the show currently cooking in our Roda kitchen, Ruined. Here’s what she says:

Though there is solid food in Ruined (peanut, anyone?), most of the preparation time for this show is beverage related -- the cast consumes more than 40 glasses of beverages and opens 28 bottles of beer and 8 bottles of Fanta onstage during each show. The drinks referred to in the script include whiskey, beer, Fanta, and Palm wine. Mama Nadi (the lead character in the play and operator of the bar in which Ruined is set) also serves an African homebrew, rum and gin. At least, that’s what the audience thinks the cast is drinking, if we have done our jobs right. In reality, nothing is as it seems.

My favorite of the drinks served onstage is the homebrew, which Mama Nadi serves from a five-gallon bucket with a ladle. It’s based on an African drink made from fermented corn, and director Liesl Tommy reports from personal experience that the homebrew served in the Congo looks white and foamy. To replicate that look for the stage we opted for a mixture of vanilla ice cream and Diet 7-Up, something of an ice cream soda. The preparation process includes a lot of foam!

There are four whiskey bottles onstage, all of which are a mixture of a strong brewed tea and water. Each bottle gets refilled daily using a funnel; we pour the tea through a coffee filter to make sure there are no stray leaves.

Though a simple recipe, the beer process is one of the longest. Since we are using brown bottles, the “beer” is just water, and the bottles are re-used nightly. The Berkeley Rep prop shop has provided us with over 60 bottles with Primus labels; we fill and cap almost 30 bottles per show, starting with rinsing and sanitizing each bottle. The dishwasher rack provides drying space till we get around to re-filling.

The process for the Fanta is similar, and Fanta is the only drink onstage that is at least mostly what it seems. The Fanta is one-half Fanta and one-half water, since drinking very sweet beverages onstage can be hard on an actor’s voice. Like the beer, we bottle it ourselves. We buy Fanta in two-liter plastic bottles, cut it with water, then pour it into our special glass Fanta bottles, which can’t be purchased at your average grocery. Fanta and beer caps get labeled with the date, so we can keep the stock rotated in the crates onstage, keeping everything nice and fresh for the actors.

There are a few other liquor bottles at the bar. The crew gets a break with the gin and rum bottles -- clear liquors that “are on tap in the kitchen sink,” as we refer to it. The script calls for Palm wine, which is also mostly water with some soy milk added to give it the appropriate opacity onstage. That about rounds out the liquid libations of Mama Nadi’s, where the worst buzz you will get is an ice cream headache. Tune in next time for info on other concoctions in Ruined, from the Fufu Mama serves for dinner to the “mud” on the miner’s feet and hands, and come see our creations in action onstage nightly!