For this year’s Fringe, Jaster and his partner, Sabrina Mandell, have teamed up with banished? productions to incorporate some of this wonderfully odd musicality into a new production, Handbook for Hosts, which will also involve shadow screens, references to an old Barbara Stanwyck movie and a secret agent. Like Jaster himself, it’s definitely not your average night of theater.

Washington City Paper: Tell me the story of Esquire’s 1949 Handbook for Hosts, which inspired this show of the same name.

Mark Jaster: It was this urbane, Esquire-styled guide for gentlemen that had to be hosts. There were these witty articles with very nicely crafted prose about everything from recipes and how to throw a good party to tips about eating, drinking, and being merry. Our collaborators, banished? productions, proposed this text as a point of departure and Sabrina Mandell, my co-artistic director, wanted to do a film noir, radio drama treatment of it. We tend to do very collage-y type works, so we used the really wonderful prose from Handbook for Hosts and crosscut it with some little scenes, vignettes, and songs from the period. We borrowed from film noir classics like Double Indemnity and Crossfire and we give credit in the program to Ed Walker’s The Big Broadcast, because that’s a big inspiration. Of the old time radio shows he plays, I love Gunsmoke and Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar.

WCP: How did this collaboration come about?

MJ: banished? productions did an amazing Fringe production last year, A Tactile Dinner, which was a meal served for the senses other than the gastronomic senses. They’re into the experiential and the participatory and we loved the text that they brought us, because it left open a lot of opportunities for interpretation.

WCP: Just to clarify: the audience won’t be going home with the skills to throw the perfect party?

MJ: (laughs) No. We’re not doing a lecture demonstration on how to be a host.

WCP: Why should people go see Handbook for Hosts over all the other options at the Fringe?

MJ: If you’re going to Fringe, you should see more than one show. In fact, you should see as much as you can. But I think ours is playful, well crafted, and full of surprises. It’s a stimulating evening of theater and who can say no to that?

WCP: How did you become a mime?

MJ: I was always doing theater from early elementary school onwards. By the time I got to high school I was serious and I knew I wanted to do theater as a career. I had a great drama coach who told me that my acting was very physical, which was true. I was a very corporal, visceral actor. He had a mime teacher friend named Budd Beyer coming to town and told me that I should go study with him. So, I skipped high school to go work with him and then he sent me on to Étienne Decroux in Paris, who was Marcel Marceau’s teacher. In the ‘80’s, I worked with Marceau himself. I find that the challenge of trying to do everything with nothing is engaging.

WCP: When did you first pick up the saw?

MJ: I’d seen people do it and I’d heard it on Garrison Keillor’s show, so I started messing around with it. It’s actually not that hard; it’s like playing one giant string. Luckily, I have a musical ear, though I don’t have much training. I’m in the old tradition of jongleurs, minstrels, and street performers, who apply their skills to entertaining people in short bursts on the fly.

WCP: So many of the techniques and pieces that you use in your show are parts of older traditions. Do you feel like its part of your job as an artist to keep those traditions alive?

MJ: We’re nostalgic and I’m not convinced that we’ve thoroughly mined some of the territory we’ve left behind. We like to bring it back in pieces. A real big influence for Happenstance is Joseph Cornell, who did the shadow boxes. There’s something about his his collaging of pieces of the past into assemblages, that become whimsical, delightful and a little mysterious, that we really love. We like taking bits of the past and contrasting and juxtaposing them with other snippets to give a new look at these fun old ideas.

Handbook for Hosts plays various times and dates at the Mead Theatre, 1501 14th St. NW (See website for details). $15. (866) 811-4111.

7(x1) Samurai
The Shop at Fort Fringe

Remaining Performances:
Saturday, July 19 @ 8 PM
Sunday, July 20 @ 2:15 PM
Thursday, July 24 @ 10 PM
Saturday, July 26 @ 1 PM
Sunday, July 27 @ 7 PM

They say: “Kurosawa’s epic tale of victimized peasants, marauding bandits, and samurai warriors – retold at breakneck pace, through movement, by one exhausted and ridiculous actor. With accompanying gibberish and vocal sound effects.”

Trey’s take: Best 45 minutes of my Fringe so far. Don’t be intimidated by the Kurosawa name-check — or by the fact that this guy’s a highly trained mime.

Solo artist David Gaines tarts up the tale of The Seven Samurai with decidedly American pop-culture tropes ranging from action-flick fight sequences to Looney Tunes cartoons — I think there’s even a nod in the direction of the Samurai homage The Magnificent Seven — using those instantly recognizable vocabularies to help tell the story almost entirely without words.

And Gaines is as deft as anyone I’ve ever seen at the efficient definition of character: A gesture, a posture, a shambling shrug, or a katana-sheathing shhhhwwwt sound, and you see the archer, the sleepy swordsman, the giant or the klutzy apprentice samurai. By the time the show culminates in an epic one-man rendition of a full-tilt defend-the-village free-for-all, the illusion is total: One guy, a couple of masks, and a white backdrop, and a roiling battle against the landscape of feudal Japan has unfolded in your mind’s eye.

See it if: You grok that, far from being an outdated discipline to sneer at, the rich nonverbal language that is mime informs contemporary entertainments from Broadway’s Lion King to Pixar’s Wall-E.

Skip it if: You’ve got better things to do than be charmed by a witty concept and a first-rate performer.