A few actor colleagues talking over old shows online remembered the set I designed for I'll Pray For You So Hard which was a densely lived in NYC kitchen.
Its admirable carpenter (and ditto actor) Drew Wall posted this continuity photo for when the set had to relocate.
(This difficult relocation was due to Fire Marshall issues. Dallas stages were getting raided round about then for permitting issues. This was just after the city-wide raids for fire exit issues at art galleries and months after the exceeding-occupancy raids on party rental spaces that left weeping 15 year old girls watching their quinceaneras kicked out... I'm all for fire safety! But there was something going on just then politically I suspect.)
Back to the tchotskies...
The official term is "set dressing" and, for certain shows, it can be the heart of the design. For this show it was all about convincing the audience that this space was real, real lived-in, and deteriorating under the pressure... pretty much a metaphor for the whole father-daughter relationship onstage.
(This deterioration thankfully allowed me to disguise the corner of the set where I botched the wallpaper as wrinkled due to a "water leak," which ruse I amplified by dripping dirty paint water and, if I remember right, some cold Starbucks that was just sitting around.)
Other sets, other sorts of set dressing - whether bare, or just ordinary, or hoarder-level, as in The Beauty Queen of Leenane, for which I special ordered Tatos potato crisps... just to scatter the empty packages around.
In case you're wondering, I can do sparely dressed too...
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