June 17th, 2024: The Writer's Center, Bethesda, MD

 Happenstance is an award winning theater company that creates visual, poetic, physical theater. With the simplest means - humor, whimsy, music, silence, text, physical comedy, clown antics, object manipulation, vulnerability and generosity - we seek to elevate the moment when the performers and audience meet, to lift the encounter beyond the daily and pedestrian into the realms of dreams, poetry, and art. Meaning is often found by happenstance. 

 Mab Just Mab is a retired touring sideshow performer who combines theatre, music, movement, comedy to bring you classic sideshow, with a taste of vaudeville, covered in comedy, seasoned with ukulele. Mab was once found monkeying around with the rest of the Cheeky Monkey Sideshow, which happens to also be "award winning", and "record setting". Mab believes that every single person has superpowers. One of Mab’s super powers is the ability to find the shortest lane at a toll booth. The other is the ability to walk on broken glass and hammer spikes into her face. 

Mark Jaster studied mime with Marcel Marceau's teacher Etienne Decroux, and then with Marceau himself, serving as teaching assistant in the Master's Ann Arbor summer intensives in the 1980's. But Mime was ultimately a tool for his clowning, which he studied primarily with LeCoq Protegée Dody DiSanto. He performed with the Big Apple Clown Care Unit (not as a mute) for 20 years, as a Fool named 'O' for almost 40 years at the Maryland Renaissance Festival, and many times with the Washington and Cambridge Revels. He co-directs Happenstance Theater with Sabrina Mandell, appearing in all their shows since its founding in 2006. He's the proud winner of the Helen Hayes/Robert Prosky Award for Outstanding Lead Actor for his multiple roles in "Impossible! A Happenstance Circus."

You may know Les S. Moore as a dapper, vaudevillesque pickpocket and sophisticate, but you may be surprised (and so may he) by some of his other skills.