What’s the deal with Lucas Hnath and tape recorders?
The award-winning author of such acclaimed plays as Red Speedo, Hillary and Clinton, The Thin Place and A Doll’s House, Part 2, among others, seems to have developed a strange fixation with using audio voice recordings as a primary element in his work. For the gimmicky (and in my estimation, wildly overpraised) Dana H., he used a tape recording of his mother describing her horrific experience of being kidnapped as a springboard for a virtuoso lip-synching performance by Deirdre O’Connell. He employs a similar device for A Simulacrum, currently receiving its world premiere by Atlantic Theater Company. This collaboration with illusionist Steve Cuiffo revolves around a recording of conversations between him and the playwright in which they discuss Cuiffo’s approach to his craft. We hear the playwright’s voice emanating from a cassette tape recorder onstage, to which Cuiffo responds live, apparently recreating his end of the discussions verbatim.
To which one can only ask, “Why?”
Cuiffo, a frequent collaborator of Hnath’s, is a very talented magician who clearly loves what he does and has a reverence for the history of his profession. So much so, in fact, that he once drafted a complimentary letter to be signed by a foreign dignitary for whom he performed by copying the exact text of a similar letter sent to Harry Houdini from a German prince. This show provides the opportunity for audiences to see Cuiffo performing his excellent sleight-of-hand illusions in very intimate circumstances, which is a considerable treat.
If only he wasn’t trapped in this pretentious conceptual theater piece in which he’s forced to respond on cue like one of those hapless volunteers manipulated by magicians as part of their act. Cuiffo is an engaging, genial presence who seems fully on board with the show’s conceit, as demonstrated by his enthusiastic “Cool!” after Hnath describe his idea for the evening on the tape. But while he may aspire to the sort of higher thematic aspirations that the playwright has in mind, he seems happiest when merely pulling off one of his tricks in virtuoso fashion.
Those are of the fairly basic variety as far as magic shows go, including various card tricks, tearing a newspaper into pieces and then instantly reassembling it, making a coin jump up in the air, and the classic cups and balls routine. But Cuiffo performs them expertly, often describing how he learned them or when he first performed them. In response to Hnath’s persistent questions and comments, he talks about his early days in which he struggled to get gigs, and talks about his wife’s aversion to magic.
“Every magic show that I’ve taken my wife to, she’s disgusted by,” he comments bemusedly. Although he’s responding to Hnath’s recorded voice, he looks directly at the audience while speaking, which only has the effect of making you think he’s seeing things.
Late in the show, which feels much longer than its 85 minutes, Hnath challenges Cuiffo to create an illusion that his magic-averse wife would love. Cuiffo responds to the challenge, telling Hnath in a conversation that apparently took place several months later that he’s come up with a list of one hundred ideas, including “bring a dead animal back to life” and “make frozen ice appear from nowhere.” Sadly, he only performs the latter.
What Cuiffo does come up with, an illusion incorporating his wife’s favorite doll from childhood, is pretty nifty. And, spoiler alert, we hear her reaction to it, since her recorded voice joins the conversation as well. But it doesn’t make that exciting a climax for the show which feels like an intriguing idea that’s been frustratingly undeveloped. The word “simulacrum” refers to a fake version of something real. The title proves all too apt for a show aspiring to theatrical profundity but mainly coming across like the sort of rambling conversation between two friends best left private.
