What does Long Wharf Theatre staff do when we get our hands on a cherry red, vintage 1976 Firebird? We don’t fix it up. We trash it.
Long Wharf Theatre's tech staff unloads the car
The theatre’s intrepid production staff spent last week putting the finishing touches on the set of Fugard’s The Train Driver, which starts tomorrow night. It takes quite a bit of work to create the ambiance of a desolate, barren graveyard and the feeling of hopeless desperation such a place engenders. The set, a boneyard with a shack on it, is strewn with junk, much of which is used to mark the graves resting there. After having trolled through junkyards all over the city, and filling the stage with dirt and ground up clamshells, they were looking for a final touch. What they felt they needed was a burnt out, trashed car. “Our goal was to make it look like death and a violent one at that,” said Jackie Farrelly, head of the prop shop. “When Eugene Lee asked for the burnt out car his thought was that it is another skeleton in our graveyard.”
The props department called S & R Auto Wrecking in Branford and asked if they had access to a car that was gutted of flammables, liquids, and machinery – in short, nothing that could explode or be a danger to anyone. A car scrapped for parts was brought over on a flatbed, dragged into the Mainstage by the crew. Mark Ketchen, a carpenter, then smashed apart the car, using a sledgehammer.
Carpenter Mark Ketchen, proud of his handiwork
Once sufficiently smashed the car was turned over to Keith Hyatte, the theatre’s long time scenic painter. Using a combination of burnt sienna, raw sienna and black, he finished the transformation from hot car to rotting husk. “I just mixed the colors together. Sometimes you put it on thick, sometimes you put it on thin. Sometimes I pooled (the paint),” Hyatte said.
Scenic painter Keith Hyatte working on the car
The car was then placed upstage right, just behind the theatre’s I-beam, one more symbol of the desolation of the place that becomes lit, briefly, with the light of human compassion.
The final product