Something Out of Nothing: Barnes’ Third Avenue Playhouse Dioramas
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When co-artistic directors James Valcq and Robert Boles opened The Subject Was Roses, their first show at Third Avenue Playhouse (TAP) in 2012, Tom Blahnik, a local florist, provided a lovely bouquet for the counter just inside the door of the theater. He continued to do so until he went out of business more than a year ago.
Boles describes Jocelyn Barnes as “one of our wonderful volunteers.” She’s been at TAP several nights a week for even longer than James and Robert and when the bouquets stopped coming, she thought the empty counter space needed brightening.
She started to create little scenes or other displays tied to the theme of each show.
“I can’t do big things for the theater,” she says, “like playing music or writing, but I like to create something out of things I pick up for almost nothing.”
For Madame Sherry, which played from July 28 to Sept. 3, Barnes wanted a display in tune with the 1910 time frame of the show. To her, that meant flowers, especially moss roses, and other sentimental items.
Jocelyn Barnes, Third Avenue Playhouse volunteer, stands before her dioramas alongside co-artistic directors Bob Boles (left) and James Valcq. Photo by Patty Williamson.
On Pinterest, she found just what she had in mind – a small Louis Vuitton suitcase filled with exactly the sort of flowers she had pictured.
“I certainly didn’t have an antique Louis Vuitton bag around the house,” she laughed, “but I remembered an interesting old box with unusual metal handles that came from the milk house of the farm we used to have. My husband cleaned it up and altered the hinges so the lid would stay open.
“I had all the flowers I needed, because they were thrown in, free of charge, with an old basket I bought at a yard sale. Online I found an original advertisement for Madame Sherry when it debuted at the New Amsterdam Theatre in New York City for 231 performances in 1910-11. I printed and framed it and propped it up in the lid of the box. Over the front, I draped a delicate lacy handkerchief that belonged to my grandmother. The display cost nothing at all.”
For the most recent show, The Gin Game, Barnes created a little tableau with the two characters, Fonsia and Weller, sitting at a card table playing with tiny cards. In the background was an antique mirror with the name of the show spelled out in Scrabble tiles, symbolic of the more impassioned game that was playing just down the hall. Barnes printed the playing cards from the internet, cut them out and pasted them to heavy paper to make them look real. She made the characters from clay molded over frames of wire, padded with bits of aluminum foil.
‘The Gin Game’ diorama designed by TAP volunteer Jocelyn Barnes. Photo by Amy Ensign.
To prepare for her display piece during the run of Isaac’s Eye last summer, Barnes watched clips from performances of the show in Chicago and New York, and collected a number of Newton’s quotations. She found a photo of the title character – a sort of modern art version – mounted it at an off-kilter angle (appropriate for Newton, as portrayed in the play) and surrounded it with quotes.
The display for A Walk in the Woods featured a hollowed out birch log filled with greenery from the woods around Jocelyn’s home.
Her talents are not limited to TAP’s shows. Last Christmas, she decorated a miniature lighted Christmas tree with white paper ornaments that had TAP’s logo on one side and actors’ pictures on the other. The ornaments got a little frazzled because people (including one of the co-artistic directors!) kept turning them over to see whose picture was on the reverse side.
For the upcoming shows, The Best Christmas Pageant Ever and Jacob Marley’s Christmas Carol, Barnes hasn’t decided what her displays will be.
“I usually have a sense of the theme I want to use,” she says, “then search my upstairs closet to see what I have that might work.”
She is a self-described pack rat, though not the kind you read about in the newspapers; her home overlooking Lake Michigan is immaculate. At a recent estate sale she spent $16 for some doweling, Christmas stockings, lots of craft materials, aprons and “little bits and bobs that someday I’ll find a use for. The closet is filled with things I don’t know what I’m going to do with, but if you want something, call me. I probably have it. I save things. That’s just the way it is.” (She found something to do with the doweling. With the addition of a circle her husband, David, cut from plywood, it’s now the tiny table in The Gin Game display.)
As for being “a wonderful volunteer,” Barnes laughs.
“I don’t know about that. Bob fires me nearly every day!”
And she claims she isn’t artistic – no original ideas at all. She’s surely the only person who believes that!
