Baby, everything dies, and that’s a fact.
That line, one of many, echoes the over-arching theme of “Metaphysique D’ephemera,” a play co-written and directed by Sarah K. Jackson, a performance studies doctoral student, which debuted Tuesday in the HopKins Black Box Theatre.
“Metaphysique” tells the story of a prince who, lost in his own memories of former glory, cannot accept that the world around him has fallen into decay even as his gilded memories of the past begin to fade.
As the play progresses the prince undergoes a journey to emerge from the past in his own mind and accept the reality of the present. The catalyst for this journey is a character called the Rabbit, played by performance studies graduate student Benjamin Haas, who manipulates the prince into facing reality.
“I’m sort of the Jiminy Cricket and the devil on the other side,” Haas said. “I kind of play both roles.”
The play is inspired by the work of 20th century artist Joseph Cornell, who is best known for his collages and memory boxes often made entirely of junk and refuse. The title “Metaphysique D’ephemera” refers to the description Cornell used to explain the meaning behind creating art from junk.
“Cornell used the phrase in his artwork to mean ‘making everyday things eternal,'” Jackson said. “He gave magic to the everyday objects that he found.”
Within the context of the play, Cornell’s fascination with old junk and memory boxes becomes the stage itself — a literal box made of smaller cardboard boxes is strung together with twine, and within the box stage is the prince amid piles of forgotten possessions.
The elaborate stage setup is the brain child of performance studies graduate student Ariel Gratch, who worked as the show’s set designer and construction manager.
“Knowing that Sarah was drawing on Joseph Cornell, I said, ‘Well, Joseph Cornell’s aesthetic is to pull from here and there and put it together to make something that shouldn’t be beautiful but is,'” Gratch said. “So I said, ‘Why don’t we try and do the same thing?'”
Gratch said his first thought was to string together cardboard boxes to turn the entire stage itself into a box. The rest of the set was also designed with Cornell in mind — a large birdhouse on stage was created from sticks and leaves and bits of trash just as a bird would do.
“My constant mantra for myself was, ‘What would Joseph Cornell do?'” Gratch said.
Travis Brisini, performance studies graduate student who plays the role of the prince in “Metaphysique,” said the play is as much a work of art as it is a performance.
“I think the show is really pretty,” Brisini said. “It’s as much a piece of installation art and video art as it is a performance. It’s lots of different arts layered on top of one another and done really masterfully with a really coherent artistic vision that I don’t think people get a lot of.”
Haas said “Metaphysique” has something to offer everyone.
“Sometimes people get scared off from Black Box shows because they think they’re going to be too weird,” Haas said. “But I think this is one of those shows that has something for everyone. I think people would be amiss not to come see it.”
“Metaphysique D’ephemera” runs through Saturday.
 
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contact Andrew Price at [email protected]