According to his Playbill bio, the star of Derren Brown: Secret has, among other things, “predicted the national lottery, convinced a shy man to land a packed passenger plane at 30,000 feet, hypnotized a man to assassinate Stephen Fry and created a zombie apocalypse for an unsuspecting participant after seemingly ending the world”—and that’s just in Brown’s native Britain, where the magician and mentalist is a veteran TV star and “his name now pretty much synonymous with the art of psychological manipulation.”
Indeed, one suspects that had Brown, whose credits also include Netflix specials, not been drawn to his current calling, he might have applied his powers of persuasion to a more nefarious one—become a cult leader, perhaps, or a marketing executive for an oil company. Let’s be glad he chose the path he did, one that led him onstage, for Brown is as natural and charismatic a live performer as you’re likely to see in any capacity this season, combining a razor-sharp wit with exuberant improvisational finesse and, notwithstanding the various gifts he displays here—which extend to sketch artistry, apparently—a disarming sense of wonder.
“I will always be honest about my dishonesty,” Brown told a preview crowd last week, but it’s the gray area between illusion and reality—how our individual experiences shape our perception—that seems to most fascinate and delight him, and form the premise of Secret, which arrives on Broadway following an acclaimed run at Atlantic Theatre Company two years back. Though written by Brown and co-directors Andrew O’Connor and Andy Nyman, the show by nature varies from night to night, drawing widely on audience volunteers who willingly (we assume) take part in a succession of routines showcasing Brown’s ability to get inside our heads and pull off astonishing feats with his own, or at least convince us that he can.
[Read Steven Suskin’s ★★★★ review here.]
While Brown appeals to critics not to reveal specifics of each performance, I can report generally that while one participant appeared to stump him at the preview I saw—”My authority is perfectly fallible,” he admitted—his multi-faceted mastery could defy disbelief, or more importantly, from an entertainment standpoint, make us happy to suspend it. (Brown was convincing enough that when he suggested at one point that some psychic interaction might be taking place in the theater, I determined to make my mind as blank as possible, lest he or anyone else try to read my innermost thoughts.)
Darting about between the faux brick walls that handsomely frame Takeshi Kata’s set, Brown also demonstrated a delectably dry facility with one-liners. Launching the first of several frisbees he would toss to volunteers throughout the evening, he fretted, “They are hard and sharp and fast, and you are a famously litigious culture.” He later quipped that an audience member’s writing showed her to be “something of an adventurous speller,” and instructed another, whose phone had begun beeping, “Don’t check that text message. It’s terrible news.”
More seriously, though with his playful spirit still very much intact, Brown observed, “We are story-forming creatures.” The enduring thrill of his job, he added, is that it allows him “to be more alive and alert to the complexity of what it is to be real.” Whatever that may be, or seem to be.
Derren Brown: Secret opened September 15, 2019, at Cort Theatre and runs through January 4, 2020. Tickets and information: derrenbrownsecret.com
