Juxtapose | A Theatrical Shadow Box
Directed by Mark Jaster and Sabrina Selma Mandell
59 E 59th St., Manhattan, NYC
January 7-25, 2026
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| L to R: Sarah Olmsted Thomas, Gwen Grastof, Mark Jaster, Alex Vernon, Sabrina Mandell in Juxtapose. Photo by Leah Huete. |
Humans have tended to imagine going to the stars rather than the stars coming to them. Happenstance Theater's
Juxtapose | A Theatrical Shadow Box, which rarely trades in the expected, provides a delightfully imaginative exception, featuring a star in human form who crashes through the roof of a rooming house during a dark time for the world. That time is constructed ambiguously–a lot of the music and costuming, for example, evokes the first half of the twentieth century, while a radio snippet about the increase is severe weather events is as contemporary as it gets–and that elasticity holds clear thematic importance as
Juxtapose asks where we can look to for light in times of darkness and the despair that those times threaten to engender. While this focus may not sound especially conducive to comedy,
Juxtapose—which cites New York visual artist and filmmaker Joseph Cornell's (1903-1972) found-object shadow box assemblages and films by Jacques Tati and Jean-Pierre Jenet as core inspirations—lives up to its title by framing its somber central concern with ebullient humor, beguiling fancifulness, and an infectious sense of visual wonder: touches of light delivered with a light touch.
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| Sabrina Mandell and Alex Vernon in Juxtapose. Photo by Leah Huete. |
Framing is inherent to the shadow box, and a large, freestanding frame the height of a person occupies the center of the stage, with some items of furniture to either side when the show begins. The lights first come up on an idiosyncratic assemblage of objects within that frame before going down and coming up again with the frame now instead containing a woman whom we will later learn is Rosabelle (Sabrina Selma Mandell), concierge of the rooming house. She is sequentially succeeded in that position by residents Blue (
Alex Vernon), Étoile (
Sarah Olmsted Thomas), and an unnamed collector (Mark Jaster), with each performing a little bit of mime, such as polishing the frame's nonexistent glass. More silent physical comedy follows this entertainingly economical introduction of the characters, until eventually ballerina Étoile speaks the play's first dialogue, which reveals her self-doubt and anxiety about her dancing, feelings which intersect with worries caused by the state of the world and are reflected in complaints about her nerves and her habit of always triple locking herself in her room. Blue is genial and, with one exception involving Étoile, silent, always carrying, tossing, or bouncing a blue ball, evoking perhaps the blue marble Earth (an actual globe also enters the action at various points). Hinting at a different type of anxiety, perhaps, the White Rabbit has nothing on the collector, who carries three different pocket watches in his waistcoat pockets, and, as one scene suggests, doesn't like people handling and disordering his items. Another scene uses one of those items to intimate that he does, though, like Rosabelle (whose Frenchness both alludes to some of the play's influences while also, given threats such as air raids, putting us in mind of the twentieth century's world wars), a kind and upstanding woman who, doubtless like many of us these days, struggles with the question of how we go on when everything is so dark, when it seems like humanity might be nearing its own end. Some of the answer will be bound up in the arrival of Spilleth (played by
Gwen Grastorf and named only in the program), who crashes into Rosabelle's building like a meteor in one of the production's many visually clever moments. She, like Blue, doesn't talk much, although she does quickly pick up a rudimentary level of language, but she has other ways to communicate and will be a catalyst for potential changes in the tenants' perspectives and lives.
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| L to R: Mark Jaster, Sabrina Mandell, and Alex Vernon in Juxtapose. Photo by Leah Huete. |
Spilleth gives off some bright, warm pulses of light after she first lands, in just one example among many of the production's outstanding visual inventiveness. Another example involves Blue appearing to manipulate a circular image, on a scrim, that evokes a liquid with bubbles (or/and a galaxy) and he and Spilleth appearing to pass a ball back and forth through the scrim, changing the ball in the process (an action with symbolic resonance). Pieces of rope play roles in moments both of emotional bonding and purging, a late dance sequence is at once hilariously absurd and cathartic, and the performers sometimes create in their movement and positioning painterly instants, including a moment between Spilleth and Blue that alludes to Michaelangelo's "Creation of Adam," a fitting image for a play that also contemplates humanity's extinction. The collector explains at one point that he sees his collections as preserving the ephemeral (even a feather, as we see in one sequence, can conjure another place, time, and even way of being), but only ever temporarily: if order, embodied via his collected things, serves as a bulwark against entropy, such little dams of preservation will always eventually give way before the tides of time. Whether in the more world-weary collector and Rosabelle, the untrammeled innocents Blue and Spilleth, or the strained Étoile, the ensemble adeptly balances the stylization of its splendid performances with the groundedness and relatability of the characters’ desires and fears. Not only aspects of the play's narrative and setting but also a proliferation of circular movement–via timepieces, a globe, records (in a cool touch, Rosabelle at various points plays music with a vintage hand-cranked record player), and even balletic dancing–highlight the repetitive quality of humanity's periods of darkness—though, as we would do well to remember, such repetition does not mean that any one such period might not be the final one. In the end though, such ideas are juxtaposed with the notion that a single point of light can multiply, no matter if it comes from art, community, or a wayward cosmic being.
-John R. Ziegler and Leah Richards
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