This review of Mindplay—New York mentalist Vinny DePonto’s solo show positing that, under highly controlled circumstances, a limited telepathic, or at least nonverbal, transference of thoughts and memories is possible—is weeks late. I just haven’t known what to make of it. A peculiar credential I brought to this assignment turned out to be something of a liability.
For about a year, I worked for Ricky Jay, a brilliant illusionist, sleight-of-hand magician, author, and character actor who passed away in 2018. I was his assistant when he toured the most successful of his stage shows, Ricky Jay and His 52 Assistants, to the Studio Theatre here in D.C. in the spring of 2005. The show was, in part, about how to cheat at cards. Jay would explain each feat of legerdemain and its historical provenance—he was as much a historian of illusions as a practitioner—as he performed it. Typically he’d recruit a member of the audience to observe him from just a couple of feet away to confirm he wasn’t, well, cheating his seemingly miraculous feats of cheating. (One night, that onstage observer happened to be veteran City Paper critic Bob Mondello.)
Jay never tried to persuade the crowd that anything supernatural was happening. He just did things that demanded such an imposing degree of skill and concentration that the effect of magic was achieved through wholly ordinary means: practice, practice, practice, as I once heard him say.
DePonto is similarly unassuming in the way he presents his chill-inducing feats to his audience. He explains that the wire running down his neck is merely a microphone; not an earpiece to allow him to receive messages from backstage conspirators. He tells us his methods of mentalism are inconstant and imprecise, and reassures us they won’t work beyond the friendly confines of the theater. Out there, he implies, nefarious actors—advertisers, tech companies—are exerting their own exponentially more powerful methods of mind manipulation upon us at all times.
DePonto is significantly younger and handsomer than my old boss was when I worked for him, and much more approachable in his onstage demeanor. But sitting through his often thrilling but uneven 95-minute show, I was reminded of all those nights sneaking glimpses of 52 Assistants from the wings, leaving me with the persistent sense I was undervaluing the difficulty or significance of what DePonto was pulling off. When I saw Jay perform, my appreciation for his abilities grew each time I witnessed them. Eventually I began to feel foolish for needing to see an apparent miracle more than once before summoning an appropriate measure of awe. Watching DePonto appear to read the minds of various members of the crowd he’d summoned onto the stage was similar. I can’t deny that many in the audience around me, perhaps even most, reacted as though they were witnessing something inexplicable and uncanny. I wondered what I was missing.
As mapped out by DePonto, co-writer Josh Koenigsberg, and director Andrew Neisler, Mindplay is awkwardly split between mentalism—DePonto’s demonstration of how to construct a memory palace, among other mind-sharpening exercises—and autobiography. The painful experience of watching his grandparents succumb to dementia, he tells us, motivated him to study how to make his own brain as resilient as possible.
The show begins with the mechanical ringing of an old rotary-dial telephone. Actually, it begins whenever someone from the audience works up the nerve, sans instructions, to walk on stage and answer it. Most ticket buyers won’t opt in quite so directly but, caveat emptor, Mindplay is an audience participation enterprise. If you’d prefer not to take part, don’t fill out the little questionnaire an usher hands you on your way in, and avoid the balloons that occasionally find their way into the audience. Despite the palpable discomfort of at least one “volunteer” on the night I saw the show, DePonto’s mode of interaction with his subjects is not derisive or mocking—John Stoltenberg interviewed two people who participated in DePonto’s experiment for DC Theater Arts and they described it as a favorable experience.
What initially appears to be an inviting demonstration of an unusual skill eventually smash-cuts into something more theatrical and pseudo-confessional as DePonto’s exploration of memory becomes an examination of his own persistent anxiety. In this portion, Sibyl Wickersheimer’s set becomes an M.C. Escher-like maze of file cabinets—a repository, perhaps, of all the memories and emotions DePonto has tried to catalog and file away. Those cabinets seem to grow sentient as DePonto pretends, convincingly, to lose the concentration that keeping the contents of his brain in place requires.
Many comic magicians employ the technique of pretending to bungle a trick, only to wow us later with an illusion far more stupefying than what they’d promised us initially. DePonto’s variation on this is to replace the comic bungling with something like a panic attack. His anxiety, albeit scripted, still feels genuine—and ever-so-slightly contagious. Only you can know whether you’re willing to be unsettled as part of the cost of being delighted.
Mindplay, written by Vinny DePonto and Josh Koenigsberg, and directed by Andrew Neisler, runs through March 3 at Arena Stage. arenastage.org. $41–$115.