Prufbox staged at our Reynolds Center's Nan Tucker McEvoy Auditorium this past December.
The Happenstance Theater returned Prufbox to the stage after a well received run in the first annual Capital Fringe Festival. The encore performance was staged before the holidays at SAAM, a proper setting, since the play's mise en scène is built to resemble the work of Joseph Cornell.
Prufbox was co-inspired by Cornell's shadowboxes and T. S. Eliot's poem "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." In the play, the stage becomes the figurative room in which the women come and go, talking of Michelangelo. Mark Jaster (a classically trained mime) and Sabrina Mandell (a poet and performance artist), both Happenstance Theater members and the play's coauthors, perform the movement and gesture–based work with puppeteering assistance from Happenstancer Lindsay Abromaitis-Smith. It's not a traditional performance — again, fitting, given the nature of the references and the Dada atmosphere for which they strive. In the spirit of Cornell's work, the play tells no literal story but relies on expressive objects and the viewers' association with these objects to create mood and achieve a narrative.
In one scene, a pas de deux between a teacup and umbrella pays especial homage to the original works by Cornell. Cornell would have appreciated the balletic property of the performance, as Cornell's Medici slot-machine works were interactive tributes to his favorite ballerinas. Happenstance's use of music by Django Rheinhart and the Comedian Harmonists echoes the surrealist atmosphere Cornell achieved in his film-montage work, Rose Hobart, by playing Nestor Amaral's dreamy Holiday in Brazil as the soundtrack.
