Buckets of Blood Means It's Curtains

Milam and his crew had settled on a recipe in the run-up to opening night, but after one particular rehearsal he decided it still needed tinkering.

"I told everyone, 'I know this will sound crazy, but the blood isn't funny,' " he says. "It was too slow. It just sat there."

That night, in the laundry room of his apartment building, he came across an old Sotheby's catalogue from a sale of impressionist paintings, including some Picassos and Matisses. For some reason it all clicked.

"It was the textures," says Milam, "I think."

Blood has always been a devilish challenge for the theater. It's not just finding a combination that looks plausible onstage, though that's hard enough. If the shade isn't just right, it can read like Kool-Aid (too red) or Worcestershire sauce (too brown). Just as tricky, the stuff needs to wash off fast, so that props, costumes and actors look unbloodied for the next show -- which on days with matinees is a matter of hours. There is plenty of stage blood for sale in theatrical supply stores, but decent stuff starts at about $32 a quart, which is fine for, say, "Romeo and Juliet." When you need five gallons every night, that adds up.

"It's like bourbon," says Brimmer, the fight director. "There is blood out there that's touted to be amazing, washes out of everything, but it's $250 a gallon. That's not cost-effective for us."

So once Milam and Brimmer settled on their formula, they outsourced production. Now, once a week, a 29-year-old "special effects fabricator" named Anthony Giordano drives his pickup truck to a food wholesaler near his home in Lodi, N.J., and buys bulk quantities of the ingredients. Then he drags them to his garage and starts stirring.

"I call it 'the mass-casualty mix,' " he says on the phone. "The key is to keep all the stuff a little above room temperature. Otherwise the peanut butter will rise to the top."

Giordano delivers about 40 to 50 gallons a week to the Atlantic Theater. It arrives in white buckets, is scooped up with plastic milk jugs and placed in Tupperware containers with labels such as "brains" and "eyes."

The blood that winds up on the stage floor is the only blend that goes straight from the bucket and into the play. The rest -- for bullet wounds, eye-gougings, cat brains and so on -- gets a variety of add-ins for dramatic effect. (A bit of olive oil, for instance, makes the cat innards a tad goopier.) One recent night, Farrell and two others were getting ready, popping the top off a new five-gallon tub. Farrell gave it a taste.

"It winds up on the actors' faces, in their mouths," she says, dipping a finger. "I just need to make sure it hasn't started to ferment."

She pauses a moment, like a wine lover pondering a '59 Chateau Lafite.

"It's fine," she says.

Everyone grabs a prop or a gun, or a jug of mass-casualty mix. Grins all around. It's time to make a bloody mess.