“Irma,” the ghost operating the grand piano, and she nails
my softball request (“Hotel California”).
The energy ramps up once the doors open, the crowd rolls
in, and the performances start. In the Close-Up Gallery,
Tom Craven peppers his card, rope, and metal-ring tricks
with a stream of old-world patter. Over in the larger Parlor of
Prestidigitation, Bill Abbott presents a mashup of puppetr y
and magic featuring a lustful monkey. In the Magic Castle’s
showcase room, the Palace of Myster y, Greg Otto performs a
comedy-laden routine (when a heckler pipes up, Otto replies,
“I thought I told you to stay in the truck”) before Kyle and
Mistie Knight deliver a classic big-stage performance heavy
on audience participation. To take the stage, Kyle passes
through a giant fan with spinning blades—the very trick I’d
spotted in one of Steinmeyer’s notebooks.
What’s striking, besides the polished performances, is
the feeling in the building. The Magic Castle rules call for
people to stow their phones, and there are no TVs. It’s a time
capsule, everything analog, and the audience arrives with a
roiling, tipsy energy. People call out to performers, laugh,
slap shoulders, and scream with surprise and wonder. No
one is sneaking a look at their phone, and no one resists the
timeless astonishment that has been conjured in magic
audiences for decades, from Charles Morritt to today.
I mention this to Steinmeyer on the drive back—he’d
been in his meeting for the duration—and he nods. “I know
it’s weird to say, but somehow magic is immune from tech-
nology,” he says. When he watches performances, he tunes
in to not just the magic but the way people respond to it. “The
thing about the Magic Castle and places like it, when you’re
there in the right size theater, the intimacy is just com-
pletely amazing. People always say afterwards, ‘I had no idea
the performances were going to be so strong.’”O
n my last day, I ask Steinmeyer straight up: How does
the sawing-in-half trick work? Two trick tables are
in the studio with us. The illusion has been around
for more than a century, and Steinmeyer has men-
tioned its timelessness and layers of innovation. So what’s
the secret? True to form, Steinmeyer gives a non-answer.
He begins a mesmerizing filibuster about the illusion’s evo-
lution, citing his friend and mentor Alan Wakeling, who
in the 1970s came up with an “incredibly elegant” design
for the trick in which two audience members shackle the
hands and feet of the woman, and instead of sawing the box
in two, the magician stabs four blades through the sides.Steinmeyer allows that historically,
the trick is that the woman pulls her
knees up to her chest when the sawing
happens. But with Wakeling’s box, you
can still see her feet sticking out the
bottom, and beyond that, the box looks
too narrow for a knee lift. So I press:
“But there’s no room for her to—”
“Right. I mean it’s all—as soon as
people believe you’re doing one thing,
you can subvert it by doing something else,” Steinmeyer
says. He smiles and shrugs as if to say, What more do you
expect?
Here, I realize where Steinmeyer has been trying to lead
me all along. In Hiding the Elephant, his narrative history
of magic, Steinmeyer points out what most of us already sus-
pect or know: The secrets of magic are often right in front of
us. He says a magician friend often tells him, “If you want to
keep something a secret, publish it.”
Magic is not about knowing how we’ve been deceived.
“Magic,” Steinmeyer says, “is an opportunity to experience
a deception without actually being threatened.”
In a world of deepfakes and identity theft and warfare by
invisible computer viruses, real-life deception has conse-
quences. You need to know the mechanisms of these “tricks”
to avoid being taken in. That’s why we press for answers.
Steinmeyer sees I’m pressing about the sawing-in-half
trick, so maybe against his better judgment, he relents. The
feet are fake, he explains. The box incorporates design ele-
ments that make it appear narrower to the audience than it
actually is. In fact, there’s just enough room for the woman
to drop her knees to one side and avoid the blades.
I nod. Huh. It’s a cool explanation, but somehow learn-
ing the answer isn’t as exciting as I’d expected. I remember
something I’d read in one of Steinmeyer’s books: Magicians
don’t protect their secrets from the audience, they protect
the audience from their secrets.
The truth of how magic works is that most of us don’t
know because we don’t want to know. What we want, instead,
is to sign what Steinmeyer calls “a mysterious pact bet ween
a performer and the audience.” We want to be in the midst of
that credulous, shrieking crowd at the Magic Castle.
“There’s no substitute for that,” Steinmeyer says. “When
you gasp or scream in response to a card trick, it’s a hot wire
to that sense of being incredibly pleased, a sense not only of
surprise, but of wonder.”
The secret of magic is not knowledge, it’s feeling. Stein-
meyer and I eventually wile away almost an hour analyzing
the early-1900s illusion with the thief and the safe. He rev-
els in the intricacies of it—the different historical accounts,
Charles Morritt’s possible motives, all the potential expla-
nations. Steinmeyer holds that feeling himself. He admires
a trick well done. He treasures the wonder that comes with
being fooled in an artful way.
Steinmeyer doesn’t know how the safe illusion works. He
never has, it’s possible he never will, and this doesn’t bother
him in the least.“EVERY TRICK HAS A FLAW. IF
IT DIDN’T, IT WOULDN’T BE A
TRICK. IT WOULD BE REALITY.”
November/December 2020 43