“Film-noir meets radio in a comic cocktail collage ignited by Esquire‘s 1949 Handbook for Hosts. Consummate recipes from a time when men were men, dames wore gloves, and sloe gin fizzed.” That’s the official description of Handbook for Hosts, the Happenstance Theater production at this year’s Fringe festival. The show is gaining fans, like our own Chris Klimek, in Fringe-going circles. We asked Sabrina Mandell, the artistic co-director of Happenstance Theater, a few questions.

What’s your role at Happenstance and with this production?

I am the artistic co-director of Happenstance Theater along with Mark Jaster. I also run most of the “business” side of things. For this production I collaborated on the concept and helped devise the piece with the other performers. I also designed the promo materials and did the costumes.

Tell me a little bit about Handbook for Hosts.

Handbook for Hosts is a theatrical collage inspired by Film Noir and 1940s radio dramas. As is the Happenstance Theater way, the show is not “story” or “plot” driven, but instead it is a thoughtful collection of scenes and images, loosely bound, like an antique scrapbook, that the audience holds together and interprets with its own imagination. And they are transported, more by bicycle, than by high speed train.