Why Kathy Fabian always gets her props

Kathy Fabian has a knack for getting what she wants.

Whether it’s an antique Russian wheelbarrow or a knife that spurts blood; a defibrillator manufactured in 1981 or a dried rabbit carcass, if it exists in this world, she’ll track it down. If it doesn’t, she’ll build it from scratch.

She’s a force to be reckoned with.

She’s Fabian.

“I believe half of my success is that I don’t quit when things get difficult,” Ms. Fabian said last week at her Brooklyn studio, flashing a smile that writers would typically characterize as indefatigable.

Ms. Fabian—her friends and colleagues refer to her simply by her surname—has been the gregarious, indefatigable properties master at the Bay Street Theatre in Sag Harbor for most of the past eight seasons, which basically means anything any actor touched on stage during that period probably went through Ms. Fabian’s hands first. Thanks to the connections she’s made at Bay Street, working alongside some of the best set designers in the business, she’s become one of Broadway’s go-to prop masters, working on the largest, most complicated shows in New York.

Having finished work on Bay Street’s “Ain’t Misbehavin,’” which runs through Sunday, August 31, she’s now focusing her full attention on launching three new Broadway shows this season: “American Buffalo,” “A Man For All Seasons,” and “Pal Joey”—in addition to a couple of Off-Broadway and regional theater productions. Recent Broadway credits include “Spring Awakening,” “Sunday in the Park with George,” “Cyrano de Bergerac,” and Lincoln Center’s “South Pacific.”

Propping (theater jargon, from the verb “to prop,” meaning to design and/or obtain props for a production) is an underappreciated art, even within the industry. Set, sound, costume and lighting designers all get recognition, but there’s no Tony Award for propping. The Drama Desk Awards even handed out an award this year for Outstanding Projection and Video Design. Nothing for props.

Casual theatergoers might assume props are limited to things like cigarettes, umbrellas and briefcases. But those thousands of albums on the shelves of the record store in “High Fidelity,” that period French furniture in the boudoirs of “Les Liaisons Dangereuses,” that body cast that Frieda Kahlo wears in “Viva la Vida,” all fall under the jurisdiction of the props master, who not only has to identify which objects are needed but what they were like during the period of the play.

“What did a passport look like in Germany in 1934? How did people seal letters in France in 1700?” Ms. Fabian asked. ”No one wakes up knowing this stuff.”

Then, of course, there’s the small task of scouring the earth to find the right props, usually in a matter of weeks or days, often on a miniscule budget. Lavish Broadway shows spend up to $175,000 on props, she says, but often she gets only what’s left over from the budget for the set, and summer stock troupes sometimes have only $600 or less. And don’t think that having one prop is ever sufficient. If something “breaks, goes missing, explodes, an actor walks away with it, or if something perishable runs out,” Ms. Fabian said, props people need to have a replacement ready in time for the next curtain.

“You do not have to know anything about anything to do this job well,” Ms. Fabian added. “But you have to be organized, and you have to be a person who’s not afraid to ask questions and get in people’s faces and say, ‘Yeah, I admit I don’t know, but we can find that out.’”

“You have to be really confident, and you have to be happy,” she continued. “People get scared if you get scared.”

Ms. Fabian packs a lot of confidence and youthful energy into her diminutive frame, which comes in handy when trying, say, to charm the pants off a liquor store owner to obtain that promotional suit of armor in the corner, which may be advertising Spanish wines at the moment but really is destined for greatness on the stage.

This happened one summer in upstate New York. The story goes that Ms. Fabian needed a bottle of potent wine to escape the reality that opening night was fast approaching and she still hadn’t found, or started to build, a suit of armor. “When I saw it, I said, ‘Am I already drunk or is that a suit of armor?’”

Propsters need to have a good sense of humor. Ms. Fabian has a quick laugh and spices her language with expletives, usually to hammer home the seeming impossibility of finding the right prop on time or the depths of exhaustion she feels as opening night nears. Her gaiety borders on a perpetual punchiness: She exudes the weariness of a genie whose lamp has been rubbed too often, too recently, and is tired of creating magic, but powerless to refuse.

A native of New Jersey, Ms. Fabian originally pursued the technical side of theater to support her aspirations of being an actress. But after the pinnacle of her performing career, a callback for the touring production of “Rent,” she dedicated herself to propping, eventually earning a job teaching the craft at the New School. There, a colleague introduced her to Bay Street, and the rest is theater history.

To hear Ms. Fabian tell it, propping is one of the most absorbing, depleting, thrilling jobs anyone would want to have in the theater. She has stories of combing the Russian countryside with flashlights at wee hours of the morning while propping for “Fiddler on the Roof,” only her second Broadway show, in 2003.

She regales listeners with anecdotes from her days with the Big Apple Circus, sewing butterfly wings for camels and costume pieces for recalcitrant yaks. And then there are even more humbling tales, of cleaning a nasty toilet abandoned on a New York sidewalk, trying to prevent the Tribeca club-goers from seeing her heave the bowl into the back of her van.

“I’ve pulled off so much crazy stuff, I feel this weird empowerment, that I can handle anything,” she said.

She describes her job as a treasure hunt, and that image suggests the sense of adventure and purpose with which she works—not to mention her swagger. But it’s an imperfect metaphor: Props aren’t ever buried like a chest of gold, and Ms. Fabian never has a map with a handy “X.” Her job is more of a high-stakes scavenger hunt, one with no assurance that the objects are anywhere within reach.

Ebay has been a godsend, making literally a world of goodies discoverable to props people from their desks. “But all the old consignment shops are closing. It’s very difficult to shop on foot, now,” she said. The Green Village Corp., not far from her studio in Williamsburg, is still a reliable treasure trove, and all of the vendors at New York’s flea markets know Ms. Fabian, who visits weekly, by name.

The lengths Ms. Fabian will go to in the name of authenticity sometimes seems ludicrous—she’ll find an appropriate stamp for a letter in the 1950s, only to have it sit unseen in a desk drawer—but she says the purpose is not to impress the audience but to satisfy the actors, some of whom “have to feel the right paper and the warmth of a real flame instead of an electric candle” to get into character.

Despite her success, Ms. Fabian is still figuring out how to cope with all of the clutter in her life, most of which is concentrated in her 2,000-square-foot studio, which is stacked high and deep with everything from whips to wine glasses. “I could live in a room with just a mattress,” she said, surveying a new shipment of props for a production of “Oklahoma!”

Sometimes she threatens to give it all up and become a dental hygienist.

But if the show must go on, so must the hunt. And Ms. Fabian never has never been one to back down from a challenge.