Stage Mother

Patricia Olive has no children. So you’d think she’d be spared that dinnertime nightmare: This one hates vegetables, this one eats only bologna sandwiches with ketchup, this one weeps about dead animals every time you serve beef. But when the Guthrie Theater staged Six Degrees of Separation in 2003, the veteran props manager got a taste of what it’s like.

“In the play, a young con artist makes pasta for a huge party,” Olive says. “It had to be real because there’s a long scene where the actors are eating it. But one was allergic to wheat products and another one refused to eat anything with tomatoes, green peppers, or onions.” Ultimately, a compromise was concocted: rice pasta topped with blackberry applesauce that had been blended with a drop of yellow food coloring, making it a deep orange. “We spent a long time experimenting to come up with that.”

But even with Olive’s hard work and careful planning, a new problem emerged: permanently stained napkins that had to be thrown away after each show.

“We discovered the actors were pretending to eat this vile pasta, then spitting it into their napkins,” Olive laughs. “So over the course of the run, the portions got smaller and smaller.”

Olive grew up in Detroit. She earned a degree from Western Michigan University in industrial education, and started her career in 1976 as a shop teacher in the Kalamazoo public schools. But she was always involved in theater: community, summer stock, experimental.

After nine years as a teacher, she took a job as the production manager for a small theater company in Florida. And she’s been in theater full time ever since. She worked in New Jersey, Tennessee, and Colorado before a friend mentioned in 2002 that the Guthrie Theater needed an experienced prop manager.

“I’d only ever driven through Minnesota,” Olive says. “But the Guthrie has such a wonderful reputation. Then I met with [artistic director] Joe Dowling. And that was it.”

In addition to consulting on sets and costumes, Olive oversees every single item actors use on stage: stuffed animals, bells, power tools. She has an associate manager, Sarah Gullickson, and a staff of six, plus a sewing area, a prop room in the theater, a warehouse on East Hennepin Avenue, and an on-site kitchen for preparing food that will be consumed during performances.

She had to fight for that last amenity.

“When the architects sent over the plans for the new theater, the prop kitchen they gave us was only six feet wide,” she recalls. “That wasn’t even enough room to open a dishwasher or oven door.” After some negotiating, Olive got a real working kitchen, about the size you’d find in an efficiency apartment.

Still, much of the food that appears on stage is fake. The seedcake served by Miss Temple in the current production of Jane Eyre, for instance, is made of painted upholstery foam, joint compound, and Flex glue; the “seeds” actually are pockmarks made with the end of a black Sharpie pen. Nevertheless, Olive and her crew did bake an authentic cake to use as a model.

In another currently running play, The Home Place, the actors eat shortbread and cold beef sandwiches—which are real, prepared by a prop liaison during each performance—and drink “Irish whiskey”—actually watered-down, unsweetened, decaffeinated instant iced tea.

“Often we need to provide something that looks like alcohol,” says Olive. “Juicy Juice is our wine of choice—we’ve found if it’s spilled on a costume it will wash out.”

Some plays call for a combination of real and fake food. In the recent production of Private Lives, for instance, the actors both ate and threw brioche. Rather than waste dozens of rolls a day—and deal with the inevitable crumbs that would be left all over the stage floor—Olive bought a couple fresh-baked brioches from Rustica, the bakery in South Minneapolis, and made up a basket of fakes. The biggest challenge, she said, was marking them so actors could tell the difference.

Over the years, one of the oddest things she’s run into, again and again, is an actor who will smoke for a part but refuses to eat meat. (Theaters are a rare exception to the statewide smoking ban in public places, which went into effect October 1; for the sake of art, you can still light up onstage.)

“Often we’ll make steaks out of bread sprayed with Kitchen Bouquet, this brown spray-on coloring that’s supposed to make food look pretty,” Olive says. “My job is to make the food look good to the audience, and I try not to make it repulsive. But it doesn’t have to be great cuisine. That’s the actors’ job: to look like they’re loving every bit of what they’re eating.”