Over the summer I worked on a production of the musical Annie. It was a great show by the way put on by the Glenview Theater Guild. There is a shanty town in Annie and I was put in charge of creating said shanty. I thought about this for a while and at first we were going to create it out of ply wood and paint it to look old and whatnot. Then we came up with a better idea, why not actually build one? We went dumpster diving for the day and found about 15 skids like they use for shipping. We made wooden frames on wagons so they could be moved. We then disassembled the skids into planks and nailed them up onto the frames, attached some old stage doors (which we beat with chains first to make them look old) and then painted the whole thing with a nice coat of dirt water. LOL They looked excellent. So if you ever need to make something look really old and disgusting, my advice is, don’t try and fake it, just do it. You will get a much better response and its more fun too.