Happenstance Theater, founded and run by Mark Jaster and Sabrina Mandell, is remounting their first creation, Prufbox, at Round House Silver Spring June 18 – 20, 2010. Prufbox was originally developed for the inaugural Capital Fringe Festival. We asked Mark and Sabrina for some insight into their work and the show:
In this season of Happenstance Theater remounts, Prufbox is the crowning revisitation. So first, an update on the others.
Photo of Sabrina Mandell courtesy of Happenstance Theater
We enjoyed seeing Low Tide Hotel and FarFar Oasis together for the first time at the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center in March. Both pieces had played at Round House Silver Spring individually, but they were built as companion pieces. The challenge and joy of that remount was managing the many fragments we collected from the two worlds: the desert and the ocean. We were pleased that when we actually put them together, the intended integrity of a theatrical “Diptych” worked. The trio of Mark, Sabrina, and Scott Sedar steadily guided the audience through a vast collection of thematic material. And it was really fun.
In April-May, The Seven Ages of Mime had a three-week revival at the beautiful new Performing Arts Center at Montgomery College in Silver Spring. That show had sold out with an extension when it first ran at RHT Silver Spring in January/February of ’07. This remount confirmed for us and a new audience what a beautiful little show it was. While some of our audience did not come to see it “again”, some folks who couldn’t get tix the first time were glad of the second chance. Some new Happenstance fans who had started following us in the meantime happily joined the crowd, too.
Prufbox is the show that began Happenstance Theater in 2006. In this, our first collaboration, we discovered our common aesthetic and began building our expressive vocabulary. Sabrina had a work-in-progress called ‘The Box Ceremony.’ Mark was invited to play. Its existential heroine seemed as lost as T.S. Elliot’s hesitant hero, so “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” became part of the material development. The original heroine became the women in Prufrock’s world, (In the room, the women come and go, talking of Michelangelo…) as he the men in hers. The “Box” of Sabrina’s original work was the portal to our mutual fascination and fondness for the Quixotic work of Joseph Cornell: his nostalgia, romance, and the “collected fragments” that make up his works.
Soon we were crafting the theatrical equivalent of a Joseph Cornell Box in which to capture and portray these two existential moderns, Sabrina’s woman and T.S. Elliot’s man. From the process and the response to the work (including invitations to perform it at The Smithsonian’s American Art Museum and The Peabody Essex Museum in conjunction with the traveling exhibit of Joseph Cornell’s works), we knew that we had found a creative wellspring together. We were imagining the next project before the first run of Prufbox was complete. We soon married, and the creative output has continued unabated ever since.
Here’s a list of what we consider our major works:
Prufbox
The Seven Ages of Mime
Low Tide Hotel
FarFar Oasis
Manifesto!
Cabaret CooCoo
Look Out Below!
Plunkett and Tremolo
And there have been many “smaller” projects along the way, too…e.g. our duo show at the Maryland Renaissance Festival, incorporating new material each of the last 5 years…
We’re currently building Handbook for Hosts in collaboration with Banished?productions for the Capital Fringe Festival this July.
- Mark Jaster & Sabrina Mandell
(To learn more about Happenstance Theater, visit www.happenstancetheater.com/.)
