I reckon I?m as thick as a brick & twice as dense at times! 

But what is a ?KKK trap door??

Would this be something like a ?Priest Hole? or part of a gallows jib?

What ever it is? You could use rostra to give the same effect, by incorporating it into the set in some way!

We produced THE FOREIGNER in a similarly miserable little space, 8 foot ceiling included!  What we ended up doing was creating a two foot high "landing" that went up to the rooms (off-stage).  We put the trap door in that "landing" and as the door swung down (we used a leverage system to slowly open it), the actor continued his descent by slowly squatting down and crawling out from behind.  (What we do for theatre!)  With an 8 foot ceiling, that only left 6 feet above the platform for the actors.  Fortunately, everybody on the "landing" was shorter than that.  I can be done!  Good luck.

Actually the trap door is the access to the root cellar. It is very common in older american homes where they had to have cool place to store their food. In the play they keep a barrel of sauerkraut in the root cellar. The funny bit about getting the sauerkraut from the root cellar sets up the premise that it can be accessed from the trap door and also from the outside. Later in the play when the good guys are capturing the bad guys (The Klu Klux Klan) they use the trapdoor to disappear into. It is suppose to be like a ghost dematerializing or the melting of the wicked witch in The Wizard of Oz. The play is hilariously funny.

When we did the play we built a thrust to accomodate the trap door. We liked the thrust so much we kept it.

Linda

 

We created a "secret" door, behind which was the pantry, established earlier in the play.  Then, we used a smoke machine to hide the opening of the door when the KKK guy had to disappear.  We put the pipes to the smoke machine in sconces so we could hide the opening of the door. It worked fine. BRW, it is about as logical as the trap door in the original.

My CT did this play a long time ago.  We actually took it to a theatre festival competition. We actually packed the entire set and travelled four hours to the competition.

 For the disappearing actor, we had a platform with a trap door that opened down.  We had a very ingeneous mechanical engineer as part of our crew and he build a hoist of some kind (hidden under the platform) that lowerd the actor. It was something like those hoist things that your car goes up on when at the garage for repairs but I think it operated on compressed air.  Add dry ice & LX specials and it looks awesome.  I could put you in touch with the fellow who built the hoist.  Send me your email contact in a PM and I can forward it to him.  Can't promise anything.     One thing we did was have as one of the KKK members (some of whom come on stage wearing their hoods) was a black actor.  He loved playing the part and we had great fun watching the audience reaction at curtain call time when the KKK guys removed their hoods.