Being the skeptic that I am, magic shows are always a challenge. Of course they want you to believe that the sensational stunts and illusions they stage are truly magical, and that they have special powers of the mind that enable them to do the seemingly impossible, but I say there’s always got to be a trick! That’s what I was thinking when I went to see the Swedish duo Brynolf & Ljung perform their show Stalker at the New World Stages. The two men have quite a pedigree, dazzling the millions who tuned into their appearances on Britain’s Got Talent and winning the silver medal at the World Championships of Magic. And then, the story goes, it was Penn & Teller, two pretty formidable magicians themselves, who were so captivated by the pair, they decided to co-produce Stalker in the states, marking the first time they’d been motivated to produce a work other than their own. I’m still convinced it’s all tricks but darn these guys are good. I left pretty gobsmacked, wondering how the heck they pulled off what truly does seem like the impossible.
The show’s theme is that cyber culture has made us all vulnerable to stalking. And with the explosion of social media, we are all capable of being stalkers ourselves. They insist their “psychic” skills involve mental manipulation in which they are able to plant images in our heads through various associations and vice-versa. Still hard to believe when we see them reading our minds with consistent accuracy. And yet it’s hard to disbelieve them when they rely so heavily on random audience participation. Take this example: they ask a volunteer to leaf through a random book and pick out a word that only the volunteer knows. And then Ljung starts guessing the word, sounding out the letters one by one.
Stalker, conceived and co-written by the two magicians along with their director, Edward AF Sillen, is an engagingly condensed 90 minutes that moves very quickly in large part due to clever pacing and the duo’s genial and offbeat sense of humor. At one point they place four chairs on the stage and ask four volunteers to decide among themselves which chairs they’ll choose to sit on. The chairs range from super comfortable to a milk crate. The woman in the comfortable chair insists that she had offered to sit in the crate but somehow ended up on the comfy chair. And then the two magicians produce a board in which they had correctly predicted where each of the volunteers would sit. But even wilder, they humorously wrote that the woman in the comfy chair behaved with “poorly feigned humility” and the man on the milk crate was a “passive aggressive martyr.” The audience ate it up!
The show ended with what felt like a fireworks finale of stunning predictions. One after another, the pair revealed seemingly unknowable details about an audience member. True to the title, they must have really been stalking him.
Technology is put to good use as the production relies heavily on camera work projected on a giant screen. It adds another layer of close scrutiny for the skeptics like me, certain it’s all done with sleight of hand. And while a lot of the tricks involve props that must have some special properties, like hidden compartments, trap doors and boards that are somehow rigged, there was one mind-bender that I’m still at a complete loss to explain. They picked two people from the audience, a man and a woman sitting on opposite sides of the theatre. Presumably they did not know each other. The two came up on stage and sat in chairs separated by 30 feet or so. They had the woman write her name down on a board but kept it close to her body without showing anyone. And then they asked the two to concentrate on each other, with the woman focusing on her name. Interestingly, the second she sat down, the name “Ann” popped into my head. They asked the man to guess the woman’s name and at first he was wrong. But after a few minutes, he looked up and said “AnnaMarie.” Bingo! Wow, did they somehow cultivate some psychic powers in me too?
But that wasn’t all. Next, they told the woman to close her eyes and stand up if she felt anything touch her body. At that point Brynolf rubbed the man’s left arm appearing to write something with his hand and instantly the woman stood up. She was asked what happened and she responded that she felt something on her arm. They asked her to look at her arm and guess the man’s name. She immediately said “Aaron”. Yep, that’s the guy’s name. The only explanation is that the two people were plants.
After the show, I saw Aaron walking out and I pretty much interrogated him. He insisted he was chosen completely at random. Either he’s a really good actor or he somehow did manage to read the woman’s mind. I’m still a skeptic but obsessed with that one. And now I’m thinking maybe it’s time for me to do some stalking of my own!
Stalker April 1, 2024, at New World Stages and runs through January 2, 2022. Tickets and information: stalkershow.com
