New historicism has come under fire in certain quarters for its perceived tendency to merely replace older totalizing histories with new ones that reify the very univocity they ostensibly strive to complicate. To respond to Deleuze and Guattari's call for “rhizomatic” histories in preference to “arboreal” ones has proven quite difficult to achieve in practice, even for the most dedicated adherents. Andrew Sofer's The Stage Life of Props comes as close as any history to realizing a comprehensive and comprehensible study of physical objects in the theatre that eschews master narratives in favor of a more fungoid methodology. In so doing, Sofer has created a convincing text that does for the history of stage properties what Joseph Roach's The Player's Passion (1985) did for the history of acting: set the stage, as it were, for a revitalized look at one of the murkier zones of theatre history as useful for students of props in general as it is to period specialists looking for new approaches to old mysteries.