Seguidamente reproduzo com a devida vénia a parte do post que se refere a NOTHING TO HIDE.
Blog: The Magic of Theater in "Nothing to
Hide" at the Geffen Playhouse
Posted
on February 8, 2013 at 11:36 am
When
a play is extended four times, a theater lover in LA (if only part-time) almost
has to buy a ticket. In my case, I bought a midseason subscription to the
Geffen Playhouse and the ticket to Nothing to Hide and Coney
Island Christmas--the funny, heartwarming Donald Marguiles play I saw
twice--came with the subscription.
A
rare January traffic jam in Santa Barbara kept me from the play directed by
Neil Patrick Harris and compelled me to buy a ticket at the subscriber discount
(62 rather than the unusually high 125). This past weekend, I had the great
pleasure of seeing the show which has become the A-List ticket in LA for good
reason. Nothing to Hide plays in the small theater where I
saw Buildin November, but since then, they have put in stadium
seating so it doesn't feel quite as small as it did.
[...]
Nothing to Hide is a mere 65 minutes which leaves
you wishing the evening would continue at Napa Grille (where I always go after
the show) with the equally charming Derek Delgaudio, an artist and magician who
founded the experimental performance art duo, A. Bandit, and the Portuguese
Helder Guimares, the youngest ever World Champion of Card Magic in 2006 at the
age of just 23.
Delguadio
reminds me a little of a young, thin Vincent D'Onofrio, striking a perfect
balance between cockiness and self-deprecation. He's the guy you want your
daughter to bring home to the Palisades from college instead of the robotic ,
cold premed student or the underachieving, dull gamer who listens to death
metal all day long in spite (or perhaps because!) of his high IQ and good
family.
Derek
and Helder, as they call themselves, did schmooze briefly afterward but I
became lost in reverie browsing the old Geffen theater posters by the restrooms
and reminiscing about the Linda Lavin show in 1998 which was last the
performance I saw before Build. By the time I wrenched myself back to 2013,
everyone was gone.
As
a child, I attended a show or two at the Magic Castle with now TV
writer/producer Chris Levinson (Charmed, Law and Order)—a
classmate and friend from St. Augustine (an industry school in Santa Monica now
known as Crossroads Elementary)--and her parents, writer/producer Richard
Levinson (Columbo, Murder She Wrote) and stage actress
Roseanna Huffman.
Some
ten years later, my mother took me to a fundraiser at that strange, private and
exclusive venue. I had therefore not been to a magic show, not even a cheesy,
terrible one, as Derek quips this show is not in one of his sarcastic asides.
Both have appeared at the Magic Castle where Neil Patrick Harris is President
of the Academy of Magical Arts and “Nothing to Hide” made me long for an
invitation to Hollywood's mecca of magic.
Derek
and Helder have the kind of chemistry you expect from a classic comic duo
together for decades. As I walked to my car, I had a big, dopey smile on my
face because while their sleight of hand does indeed boggle the mind, I was
genuinely touched by the only "message" moment of the play: Magic is
all gone in a world with iPhones, iPads and 3D (paradoxically because these
devices make the magical commonplace). That, as Derek put it, a bunch of people
got “dolled up” and braved LA traffic on a Saturday night to sit in a small
theater with complete strangers in the collective hope of witnessing something
inexplicable and mysterious is a kind of magic in itself.
There
were gestures in the direction of a message with the early mention of the
distinction between the supernatural and the supernatural and the exhortation
to look at things from a different and perhaps uncomfortable perspective, but
these were not much pursued. As a literary critic by training (a Ph.D.
Candidate in English at UCSB by way of Yale), I marveled at the subtlety with
which the vignettes are woven together. The show is loosely structured with
plenty of margin for error--ad libbing and riffing off the audience even at the
Geffen with a heavy industry crowd is chancy--and yet inexorably comes together
as a unity by the end.
Nothing to Hide is a kind of meta-play in that the
conventional structure of a play with even a highly diffuse plot is immediately
renounced in the opening scene : an entirely silent card cutting contest which
contains more emotional content and character development than whole episodes
of many TV shows (and certainly, the worthless reality shows littering cum
defacing the television landscape).
Like
much good art in which content and form are in dialogue, the play operates on
two levelsNothing to Hide is about magic but it also asks how a
play about magic can work at all. J.L Austin'sHow to Do Things with Words defined
a performative utterance as one in which the language performed the action it
described. The quintessential example was the “I do” in a marriage ceremony.
Years
after Austin (via John Searle's theory of speech acts), performativity became
hot in literary and critical theory. Ever so gently, the show conjures up the
performative for an audience member like me with a literary critical
background. Without being heavy-handed or ponderous, the show questions the
categories of truth and falsehood and perhaps more important, the source of our
attachment to the certitude those categories purportedly provide.
Nothing to Hide continues through Feburary 24th and even at 125 dollars per ticket
for non-subscribers (substantially higher than most Geffen shows), it's money
well spent.
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