Prop: Pig innards
Appearing in: “Rose Rage,” Chicago Shakespeare Theater
Jennifer Smith, the production manager at Chicago Shakespeare Theater, wasn’t worried when she heard there would be raw meat in the Henry VI trilogy adaptation “Rose Rage.” “I thought the meat would be steaks, which would be easy to get,” she recalls. But her optimism faded when director Edward Hall arrived from England and explained that by raw meat, he meant offal–that is, the parts usually thrown out when an animal is slaughtered. The play is set in an abattoir where butchers hack up the innards to represent people killed in the War of the Roses.
Though Carl Sandburg called Chicago the “hog butcher for the world,” finding pig intestines, lungs and hearts wasn’t easy. In the Yellow Pages, Smith found the owner of a wholesale meat company willing to order the innards. Unfortunately, that was impractical: The play, running through January, needed a new weekly supply.
So the wholesaler gave Smith the name of a slaughterhouse owner on the South Side. She followed the fresh lead, taking props master Dan Nurczyk to the plant to work out a deal.
“We couldn’t see the pigs being killed, but the most disturbing part for me was the machine called the de-hairer,” says Smith. “They put a dead pig in and it shakes and makes a lot of noise and then spits out a bald pig.” Nurczyk recalls. “I was expecting the worst, but it wasn’t as gruesome as I thought it was going to be, although the smell got to me a little bit.”
They took a pound of innards back to the theater. Smith thought they’d use five pounds per show, but it turned out she needed 20–or 80 pounds a week: “At $1 a pound, it was much less expensive than steak.”
Nurczyk goes weekly to pick up the innards, which are still warm when double-bagged in plastic. At the theater, he separates them into small portions and puts them in a spare refrigerator so they can cool down.
“Otherwise, the body heat would cook the meat and it would spoil faster,” he explains.
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Rose Rage,” through Sunday, Chicago Shakespeare Theater, Navy Pier, 600 E. Grand Ave., $70; 312-595-5600.