In 2017, festooned with furs and antlers, Gaston’s chair was center stage during CTC’s production of Beauty and the Beast.
photo by CTC
Although temperatures outside hover around freezing and snow covers the ground, spring cleaning is well underway inside Chattanooga’s Theatre Centre.
Weeks ago, workers began scouring CTC’s attic – packed tight with props from former theatrical productions – for superfluous items.
Soon their temporary storage area – the mainstage – was piled high with relics, some of them decades old: bar stools, bicycles, vintage luggage, area rugs, small appliances, plush velvet chairs, a lonely guitar and an empty Kellogg’s Corn Flakes box.
Scott Dunlap, CTC youth theatre director, said such purgings of the props inventory occur periodically and are necessary to eliminate clutter and potential hazards.
“Plus,” he added, “we need the room.”
Since 1923 – when a newly founded nonprofit known as the Chattanooga Little Theatre staged its first production in a repurposed fire station – CTC and its predecessor have provided nearly a century’s worth of continuous seasons of entertainment for Hamilton County residents and their neighbors.
Currently, CTC is about halfway through its busy 2019-2020 schedule featuring 11 wildly diverse plays including Dreamgirls, Amen Corner, Matilda and Barefoot in the Park.
Its stages stay busy.
The surplus items on the mainstage had to go, Mr.
Dunlap said.
Some of the discarded props had appeared on stage in production after production and were showing their age, according to Mr. Dunlap. One massive chair, for example, had provided yeoman service for over two decades.
“I first remember it being used as Santa’s throne in the 1997 production of Miracle on 34th Street,” he recalled.
Another of its reincarnations occurred in 2011; that time, it provided seating during the “Miss Baltimore Crabs” number in CTC’s production of Hairspray.
In 2017, the chair – festooned, this time, with furs and antlers – was back on stage in Beauty and the Beast. Disney villain Gaston sat in it during the tavern scene.
What to do with it and the other artifacts that had outlived their usefulness as theater props?
Easy. CTC workers scheduled a rummage sale.
Then they went on Facebook to invite souvenir collectors and bargain hunters to come inspect their bedraggled fainting couch, assorted kitchenware, a worn wooden whiskey barrel and other artifacts. “Our rummage sale on the mainstage is tomorrow,” the notice read. “And have we got stuff!”
On sale day, many items found new homes.
One of them was a “huge tribal drum that had a skin that was starting to go,” Mr. Dunlap said.”(The buyer) has plans to remove the skin and use it as a planter.”
On the other hand, he said, “There was a really nice mauve armchair that didn’t sell, which was surprising as it was in really good condition.” That chair, as well as everything else which did not find buyers, has been donated to the thrift store operated by Chambliss Center for Children.
The star of the rummage sale, according to the youth theatre director, was the antler-bedecked chair from Beauty and the Beast. “I can’t say that ‘every’ man who came to the sale sat in it but many, many did,” he said. “Almost everyone noticed it.”
In the end, though, it was one of the actors who formerly played the role who took home Gaston’s chair, according to Mr. Dunlap.
Sandwiched between some yoga mats and a couple of armchairs, Gaston’s Chair made its final onstage appearance during Chattanooga Theatre Centre’s recent rummage sale.
photo by CTC