This is the story of two puppeteers who met in New York and became a couple about 15 years later.
In March 2009, Jonathan Isadore Levin had just co-founded Puppet Playlist, a puppetry and music cabaret in Manhattan. Marta Mozelle MacRostie, who had received a bachelor’s degree in puppetry arts from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, had recently moved to New York and was looking to make connections.
Levin remembered meeting MacRostie at a Playlist rehearsal, but he was blown away after seeing her work in their second show. “She made one of the most fun pieces we had, this bedbugs act.” From then on, he said, MacRostie “became one of the strongest, most exciting artists in the original Puppet Playlists.”
Levin, who was raised in Manhattan and Long Island, graduated from Oberlin College with dual bachelor’s degrees in neuroscience and theater. The pair became entrenched in the same theater circles and were “fun acquaintance friends,” as MacRostie put it, grabbing coffee occasionally to discuss theater and seeing each other at birthday parties. “We were both in other relationships, so dating wasn’t really on my radar,” he said.
In early 2022, they ran into each other for the first time in awhile in Prospect Park in Brooklyn. “We talked about clown stuff,” said Levin, now 41, “because I had just taken this clown workshop in France, and she’s into clowns.”
Their professional connection reignited, MacRostie texted Levin about booking shows, then helped him with a puppet project. “We were in my apartment by ourselves, spray painting and sewing and hot gluing,” said MacRostie, 43. “It was not romantic at all.”
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Levin was the first to catch feelings, as their conversations deepened from work into dating frustrations and desires for the future. Less than two months after realizing his interest, in July 2023, he confessed his crush to MacRostie on a walk. She panicked.
“I think my reaction was happy but overwhelmed and like, ‘Whoa, what? No,’” she said. “In various ways, I wasn’t ready.” She told him she wanted to stay friends.
They tried to move on from the awkwardness. “I wrote some sad, lonely songs,” Levin said, “and then we kept hanging out, as friends.”
Then came the solar eclipse of April 2024.
MacRostie arranged a trip with their social circle up to the path of totality in northern Vermont, where they would stay with another friend’s parents. One by one, each friend dropped out, until only Levin was attending. When the two reached their lodgings, they realized they had been given a shared room.
“We just stayed up all night, laughing and talking, and trying to sleep and not sleeping,” she said.
As a result, they were exhausted on April 8, 2024, the day of the eclipse. They were catching some rest, lying on the grass, when MacRostie took Levin’s hand. “I felt like every muscle in my body was tense, and all the neurons in my brain were going off at the same time,” Levin said. “I was shorting out.”
Their first kiss was interrupted by a stranger, who alerted them that the eclipse had already begun.
From that moment on, they were a couple. “It was clear that if we were saying yes to this, we were both all in,” he said.
In August 2025, during the week they moved in together in the Kensington neighborhood of Brooklyn, Levin proposed on Jacob Riis Beach in Queens.
They married on May 24, at Adena Orchard in Jewett, N.Y., with about 100 guests in attendance, many of them from the theater. The ceremony, which took place in a barn because of rain, was officiated by Rabbi Karen Levine of the Woodstock Jewish Congregation.
The weather cleared up in time for their “rumpus parade,” a surprise processional of a brass band, stilt walkers and puppets. Most of the performers were friends of the couple.
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