Before you miss it: The Ghosts Which Survive Us
EgoPo explores the afterlife in a play about Houdini, with an astounding miniscule cast.
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EgoPo Theatre’s The Life (and Death) of Harry Houdini takes place in the final moments of the great escapist’s career. Houdini, harried by unknown antagonists, tells the story of his life and his boundless ambition. There is no time for costume changes or even a moment’s blackout in the show’s 75-minute-long run. The short, tight scenes—some as short as two lines—performed with the fluidity of a vaudeville cabaret, are woven together and driven inexorably forward by the dying anxieties of an intensely ambitious man. The play moves at a fever pitch, giving audiences—and Houdini—little time to breathe.
Beside Harry and his wife, played by Robert DaPonte and Lee Minora, three actors play a constantly changing cast of characters. Role changes happen right before the audience’s eyes. In the time it takes to flick a scarf over her shoulders, Houdini’s bent-backed mother, played by Maryruth Stine, is transfigured into a salacious, mocking flapper. By straightening or hunching his shoulders, actor Tyler Horn plays several pivotal characters, including: Houdini’s affable manager, his stern, estranged father, and one of the specters who torment Houdini throughout the night. The ghost resembles a night club bouncer, or a sinister maitre’d, and sucker-punches Houdini again and again, halting the action of his story and recalling the gut-punch which some say killed him.
Despite the blink-quick character switches, and the simple set and costumes, there is a perfect clarity to the story, which never leaves the audience behind, as the mercurial spirits urge Houdini ever onward toward the end.
It is the shadowy substance of human ambition that director Brenna Geffers and her company are exploring here. DaPonte’s Houdini is the underdog, the “hero of every immigrant who was ever spurned” as he calls himself. Born Erik Weisz, a Jew from Budapest, Houdini is faced by the suffering and oppression of his people. He is burdened by a responsibility to his heritage, but overcomes abject poverty and humiliation to become the greatest performer in America and the world, garnering vast audiences and respect.
Despite his fame, no new achievement contents him.
“Were you happy then?” ask the spirits, time and again. “Does it matter?” he responds. Houdini is a man whose desires can never be fulfilled, or even defined, as responsibilities and passions draw him in many opposing directions. He wants his mother to love him. He wants to both support his family and outstrip his father and brother. He needs the unceasing presence and affection of his wife Bess. But his mother’s affection is lavished on his father. Similarly, Houdini is incapable of truly loving his wife the way she adores him. His people, too, he eschews; under the secular name of Houdini he performs for clamoring crowds in Moscow, where Jews are not allowed. More than anything, this complex interweaving of responsibilities and concerns, even up to Houdini’s own happiness, is eclipsed by his boundless, relentless drive for more.
The stark tragedy revealed here is that even a man like Houdini, who was the greatest escape artist of his time, and whose legacy reaches forward a century, cannot take his success with him.
Mac Wellman, playwright and czar of the New York avant-garde theater, says that all plays are site-specific. The Vaudeville-era Plays and Players Theater both shapes and is shaped by Houdini.
Set designer Doug Greene places the audience in a unique place: behind the proscenium. Risers taking up half of the stage provide a rare perch from which we look out over the historic building’s auditorium, its 300 red velvet seats, elaborate balcony, and chandelier.
On the down half of the stage, toe-to-toe with the front row, the greater part of the action takes place. But the auditorium is more than just a backdrop: the center aisle becomes a thrust for dramatic entrances and long scenes, and the balcony, the seats themselves and the orchestra all become playing areas. Houdini haunts all quarters of the centenarian theater, taking us at a feverish pace through his life’s drama, in his attempt to make contact with the people he left behind.
A choice like this could easily be a gimmick; one promotional email from EgoPo promised to take audiences “behind the scenes of this magic show.” But under careful hands a good idea becomes a genius decision. With this simple switch the company upgraded themselves from one stage to four or five diverse playing areas, greatly increasing the depth of the space. And the unique vantage point proves a dynamic part of this glimpse into Houdini’s world, which existed so much in theaters, and his ambitions, which had so much to do with his audiences.
Houdini himself, I think, would approve. Why have one audience when he could have two: the audience in front of him, rapt, leaning forward in their seats, and the ghostly crowd behind?
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Check out Julius Ferraro’s blog here.
