What follows is one of the many articles in the Mercury’s 2026 Fall Arts Issue. Find a print copy here, subscribe to get a copy mailed to you here, and if you’re feeling generous and want to keep these types of articles coming, support us here.—eds.
What do dead yellow jackets, dryer lint, Model Magic clay, and cardboard coffee sleeves have in common? They’re all materials set dresser and prop designer Olivia Vavroch uses to make fake food, a medium that has become a particular niche of hers.
Vavroch’s food props have appeared in over a dozen plays, including shows by Artists Repertory Theatre and Third Rail Repertory Theatre; this fall, she’s making props for Artists Rep’s Marsha Blovotnik and the Marvelous Magical Chicken Soup, opening October 31. She also teaches students how to make their own fake food through the Portland Community College (PCC) community education program.
Vavroch’s route to fake food was anything but direct. An elementary and special education teacher by training, Vavroch has also worked as a stained glass artist, teacher, and restorer, breathing life back into works from the historic Portland-based Povey Brothers Studio, the artists who created the stained glass for Pittock Mansion and dozens of other grand buildings in Portland.
But after contracting long COVID in 2022, she suffered from fatigue and was no longer able to do the heavy lifting that stained glass restoration required. Looking for work that would also exercise her creativity, she started learning puppetry at Imago Theatre in Southeast Portland. When a show’s set design called for a fake lasagna prop, Vavroch immediately volunteered to make one.
“I took it in, and they were like, ‘What the hell is this? This is incredible!’” Vavroch says.
That lasagna, like the rest of Vavroch’s fake food, was created with simple materials: styrofoam, recycled cardboard, hot glue, air dry clay, and acrylic paint. In her classes at PCC, Vavroch encourages her students to explore what kind of textures they can create with found materials. She uses the bubbly edges of coarse styrofoam to resemble berries peeking out of a slice of pie, studded with dots of hot glue—painted translucent purple for added effect. A little puddle of hot glue, also painted with clear purple, acts as the pie’s juice oozing out. Soft foam can be torn to look like a piece of cheese. She balls up wads of tissue paper and wraps them in masking tape to create strawberries, with bits of paper at the top cut to look like leaves. Many items are also repurposed: old spray-painted checkers become bonbons in a box of chocolates.
Time is a key element in making food props. With Model Magic air dry clay, she makes things like chocolate chip cookies with realistic crackly tops, letting the clay dry partway before adding texture with a rough wire brush and Brillo pad. Acrylic paint brings her creations to life, and she’ll often paint multiple layers of different colors of paint, allowing one layer to dry before painting another on, pushing watered-down paint into the ridges of the fake cookie and wiping it away from the higher surfaces.
One of Vavroch’s biggest pieces, entitled Suspended Comfort, was displayed at Base Camp Studios in Seattle. The tornado-like amalgamation contained dozens of her favorite comfort foods from her youth: sandwich cookies, McDonald’s cheeseburgers, candy orange slices, frosted sugar cookies and ginger cookies, slices of cake, and cherry and apricot kolaches, all attached to a copper structure that she created using her soldering skills from stained glass. The sculpture is meant to hang over viewers’ heads, spinning tantalizingly. For Vavroch, it’s an ode to the foods she can no longer eat due to health issues.
“It’s helped me to express a lot of grief, especially since a lot of it is food that I can’t eat anymore,” she says.
Her fake food was a focal point in Profile Theatre’s 2025 staging of Witch, where a half-eaten feast repeatedly appeared between scenes. The play was based in 1600s England, so Vavroch dove into research—what was in season, what foods existed in the region at the time, what cooking methods would have been used? She also leaned into the challenge of making a partially devoured feast, with the filling of a half-eaten pot pie seeping onto its metal serving dish and the tines of forks coated in a gravy-like sheen.
“I love doing storytelling with the work that I do, and so it was interesting to build what’s left over at the end of a feast, instead of a beautiful feast that’s perfectly set out at the beginning of a meal,” Vavroch says.
But fake food doesn’t always have to look appetizing. One Halloween, for a massive haunted house that took over the basement of the Veterans Memorial Coliseum, Vavroch created fake food props to match the macabre vibe: fake figs with dead yellow jackets collected from a trap in her backyard, foam cheese covered with mold made of dryer lint, and a gravy boat with a fake hoof and teeth in it.
These work experiences can’t help but influence her PCC classes. She’s taught a course on sweets for Valentine’s Day, as well as one on medieval appetizers based on her work for Witch. This fall, along with several stained glass classes, she’s teaching a four-week class at PCC called Haunted Charcuterie, drawing from her experience making haunted house props.
“There’s something almost subversive about making anything that would normally look perfect and pretty, and then making it just disgusting,” Vavroch says. “People would walk around and look at other people’s work and be like, ‘That looks disgusting,’ and it’s such a compliment in that class.”
In the theater world, the audience never thinks about Vavroch’s set pieces. Good prop work, she says, should go unnoticed—a sign that the props are blending seamlessly into their environment. But she’s received plenty of positive feedback from the shows’ casts.
“Actors repeatedly come up and tell me that the detail and the textures of their props, whether it’s food props or otherwise, have helped enhance their storytelling,” she says.