A Simulacrum (Play)

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    With Magic, There Is No Such Thing as Total Invention

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    In this age of reboots and remakes, a magic show seeks “a total invention” even as it deconstructs that desire, showing how rare a truly new work is.Is originality overrated?Nothing in art is more thrilling than a new idea. And the cliché is the enemy of anyone with standards. And yet, have you looked around at the culture lately?Reboots, sequels and franchises pack movie theaters. Jukebox musicals remain popular on Broadway. TikTok virality is often built on repurposed songs and dances. The amount of derivative work makes you wonder if the demand for the new is in decline. The acceleration of artificial intelligence into our lives raises the stakes. What can artists or writers do that ChatGPT cannot? We need an answer quick.By dramatizing the anxiety behind the question, “A Simulacrum,” a fascinating play of ideas disguised as a magic show at Atlantic Stage 2, lingers in my mind, growing in stature upon reflection the way collections of tricks rarely do. Ever since Penn and Teller burst on the scene, every magician seemed to be deconstructing illusions while doing them. But this peek behind the curtain is something new, while, as its title suggests, not being original at all. That paradox becomes part of the point.The show is a reproduction of a series of conversations over several years between the magician Steve Cuiffo and the director Lucas Hnath (both are credited as playwrights) about the development of this work. We only hear Hnath, on a recording played by Cuiffo, the sole one onstage. Hnath asks Cuiffo to show him a trick, and after he does, multiple times, artistic tension between collaborators emerges.The crux of their conflict is that Hnath, an artist from the world of theater not magic, appears unimpressed with how many of the tricks derive from previous magicians. He is indifferent to a familiar but amazing trick in which Cuiffo rips up a newspaper and puts it back together. Show me something new, Hnath says, as if that is the only thing worth doing. Come up with a “total invention.”“A Simulacrum” dramatizes the anxiety behind artists’ search for the new.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesCuiffo, who has an amiable if strained smile, a precise gait and spiky hair, is stymied if not baffled by this request. “It’s all a variation of something,” he says of magic. “All methods are variations.”This is something I have heard magicians say offstage. The idea is that there are a limited number of tricks, and every one of a certain stature in the field knows them, more or less. So the difference between being good and great is less about the radical novelty of the illusion than the packaging, the persona and the rigor of the performance.In other words, there is no such thing as total invention. This idea is built into so many magic shows, including the current hit, “Inner Circle,” by Asi Wind at the Gym at Judson in Greenwich Village. The dialogue around theater tends to be slightly different. Its history is full of revolutions and breaks from the past with occasional acknowledgments of influence integrated into the work.I’d argue that this is a difference in style and rhetoric more than substance. All art is built on influences, old forms, inherited tropes, even the greatest examples. Shakespeare was an inveterate plot thief. On a recent podcast for The Economist, a quiz asked employees to guess whether lyrics were from songs by Bob Dylan or a ChatGPT imitation. They didn’t do that well. Dylan is often seen as an avatar of originality, but of course his singular mind operates not unlike ChatGPT, collecting, synthesizing and processing references.Cuiffo is a skilled if more ordinary performer, who is open about his debts. He begins tricks by reading from old books of magic or citing something that Houdini did a century ago. Hnath balks, suggesting that quoting sources crowds out what matters, the revelation of who he really is. To his directorial eye, that appears to be where originality lies. In the self. And he sets out to get Cuiffo to to be vulnerable, to embrace failure.Cuiffo wants no part of it. He prefers to hide behind his craft. If he could have one real magic skill, he says, it would be the ability to disappear.Magic has historically maintained a narrow emotional palette. But this is changing. Derek DelGaudio’s 2017 stage show “In & of Itself” (which became a documentary on Hulu) was the last real reinvention of the form because it found a way to not just surprise people but also move them. Its most bravura trick is rooted less in a display of mastery than one of vulnerability. Its big crescendo, which involves a quiet reading of a letter by an audience member, is more private and personal than magic typically has been. “A Simulacrum” aims for a similar if more subtle effect, in a more downbeat, even melancholy mood. It’s a show that is less about magic than the toll doing it takes.Derek DelGaudio found a way to move audiences with magic in “In & of Itself.”Caitlin Ochs for The New York TimesThat image of the confident, in control showman who always comes out on top, it’s nothing if not predictable. That makes it a useful tool for misdirection, a setup for a surprise and reinvention.At one point, Cuiffo does a fairly modest-looking card trick, the one where he gets closest to claiming originality. “I’ve definitely made it my own, in a way,” he says. Asked how long he worked on it, the magician says 14 years. Hnath asks him to do it again and when he does, the director says, with a touch of cruelty: “That’s it?”Making art look effortless is the hardest and least appreciated work. Whatever Hnath says, he clearly understands that, and his show aims for a casual, off-handed style, as if the audience just walked in on two people working on an average day. The magic tricks are beautifully done, but not especially unusual. Cuiffo performs the final one with a minimum of patter. He does it for his wife, whom you hear on the recording but don’t see. She hates magicians and magic, which adds to the drama and the poignancy. The trick is a nice feat, but it isn’t played for a big ta-da.The magician gets more reserved as the show proceeds. His physicality and patter recede and he projects an odd melancholy. By the end, it’s not even clear that he likes magic. For the big finale, he mumbles, “Yeah.”It’s the least triumphant end to a magic show I have ever seen. Is this exhausted understatement an honest reflection of his feelings about his work or might it just be an attempt at doing something new? Or both?In art, the new and the old are inextricably tied together. The balance shifts, work to work, but you can’t divorce one from the other. You don’t leave this show thinking that originality isn’t essential. Far from it. It’s just rare. That only makes it more precious. More

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      In ‘A Simulacrum,’ Steve Cuiffo Has Nothing Up His Sleeves

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      The magician worked with the playwright Lucas Hnath to create “a more vulnerable version of magic performance,” Hnath said.Steve Cuiffo began performing magic the way that most kids do. His brother did tricks. So did an older cousin. A grandfather had a routine with a handkerchief and a dime that absolutely killed. While he was in elementary school, he started entertaining at birthday parties, first for $5 and then more. He kept up his routines even as he studied theater at New York University and began to work with avant-garde companies like the Wooster Group.“I always had a deck of cards in my hand,” he said recently. “I still kind of do.” (Technically, on the afternoon of our interview, they were in his shirt pocket.)For some years, he kept acting and illusionism separate. But gradually he combined them: first with “Major Bang,” a nuclear-terror comedy for the Foundry Theater, and then through work with Rainpan 43, which premiered the ecstatic magic lampoon, “Elephant Room.” He was also a magic consultant on other productions (television shows and movies, too), including Lucas Hnath’s 2013 play “A Public Reading of an Unproduced Screenplay About the Death of Walt Disney.” (He and Hnath had overlapped at N.Y.U., but only became friendly later.)One day, during rehearsals for “Disney,” while watching Cuiffo teach the actor Larry Pine how to cough up bloody handkerchiefs, Hnath recalled telling that show’s director, Sarah Benson, “I could just watch that all day long.”Cuiffo performs both classic tricks and some new ones, including a few that fail.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAnd now he can. Cuiffo and Hnath have created “A Simulacrum,” which includes both classic tricks (the ambitious card, the torn and restored newspaper) and some new ones. Unusually for a magic show, it also incorporates several tricks that fail. Because “A Simulacrum,” running through July 9 at Atlantic Stage 2, is less a demonstration of magic than a deconstruction of how and why magic is made. To perform it, Cuiffo, 45, had to unlearn most of his habits, to strip away any vestige of showmanship.“This whole show is trying to answer that question of what is magic,” said Cuiffo, sunk into a couch in his dressing room, deep underground at the Atlantic Stage 2 space in Chelsea, and dressed in magician-appropriate all-black.His offstage persona is fairly close to the stage one he favors — rumpled, excitable, mildly sardonic, casually authoritative. Writing in The Times, Maya Phillips complimented his unflashy stage presence: “He’s low-key, grounded in both his gestures and his manner of speech.” If there is space between the man he is and the man he plays when he’s making cards appear and disappear, he can’t quite find it.“If I had a therapist, maybe I could answer that,” he said.Cuiffo, a familiar face Off Broadway, is unusual both in how he fuses magic and theater, which few performers do, and in how he appears to combine rigor with a seeming spontaneity.“He’s this great improvisational performer at his deepest core,” said Christine Jones, who was moved to create the one-on-one performance event Theater for One after Cuiffo performed close-up magic for her at a wedding. “But of course that’s balanced with hours and hours and hours of practice that is not improvisational at all.”Earlier work: Cuiffo, far right, with Trey Lyford, left, and Geoff Sobelle, center, as dorky-cool suburbanites with a fixation on sleight-of-hand in “Elephant Room: Dust From the Stars,” a play performed on Zoom in 2020.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesGeoff Sobelle, who created “Elephant Room” and its sequel, “Elephant Room: Dust From the Stars,” with Cuiffo and the actor Trey Lyford, described a different balancing act, a reverence for and an impatience with magic as an art form.“As much as he loves this stuff,” Sobelle said, “he also totally wants to tear it down and just rip it apart.”After “Disney,” he created the mentalism routine for Hnath’s “The Thin Place,” a ghost story about a woman with supposed psychic powers, and the vanishing act in “Dana H.,” a first-person account of the kidnapping of Hnath’s mother. When “Dana H.” premiered at the Center Theater Group in Los Angeles, a member of the company’s artistic staff commissioned this new magic show by Hnath and Cuiffo.Their first of three workshops for what became “A Simulacrum” took place on East 15th Street in August 2021. The collaborators had set a few parameters. Hnath, who was raised as an evangelical Christian, had performed magic as a teenager, typically as a way to illustrate Gospel lessons. That experience has made him allergic to both audience participation and flimflam, so they had decided on a format that was closer to an interview.“I really wanted to find a way to make a magic show that I would want to watch,” Hnath said in a recent interview. “I wanted to make an honest magic show.”Hnath also decided they would record the workshops, which ultimately ran to 50 hours. Hnath then edited the recordings, with his voice appearing on tape and Cuiffo recreating, at each performance, his own side of the conversation.“We’ve set it up so I don’t have to act,” Cuiffo said.Cuiffo recalled his excitement for that first workshop. He had plenty of tricks to show Hnath, some old, some new. He figured they would choose the best ones and refine them. But as he moved from one to the next, Hnath remained unimpressed. The routines felt too polished, too slick. Hnath preferred messiness.“I wanted to see how much I could stack on top of him and still watch him wriggle his way out,” Hnath said of Cuiffo. “He really is a magnificent problem solver.”Victor Llorente for The New York Times“I like the real mistakes, not the fake ones,” he said. “Too often magic and performance feels superhuman. I was interested in a more vulnerable version of magic performance.”In anticipation of the second workshop, to be held three months later, Hnath set up several impossible or nearly impossible tasks: Cuiffo had to create a trick that would realize some fantasy or desire, a trick that would fail, a trick in which the outcome would be a surprise and — this prompt was possibly the hardest — a trick that Cuiffo’s wife, the actress Eleanor Hutchins, would love. (As Hutchins confirmed in an email, most magic makes her “uncomfortable.”)“I wanted to see how much I could stack on top of him and still watch him wriggle his way out,” Hnath said. “Because he really is a magnificent problem solver.”That second workshop, as the show reveals, didn’t go very well. “Brutal” and “stressful” were the words that Cuiffo used to describe it. A perfectionist, Cuiffo struggled with the prompts. These were problems that he couldn’t solve, at least not in the way that Hnath required. Eventually, the workshop devolved into a two-hour fight, which erupted when Hnath critiqued the props that Cuiffo planned to use in the trick for Hutchins as “cheating.”“That got gnarly,” Cuiffo recalled. “Like, are you telling me how I need to make a piece for my wife?”There was one further workshop, which forms the show’s third act, although to say too much about it would be to blight the surprise. Cuiffo did eventually develop a trick and Hutchins confirmed that she did in fact love it.“It was unexpected, understated and personal,” she wrote in an email. “It was cute, funny and nice, just like Steve.”The show was designed to be about process, not product, however funny and nice. Despite the stress and the arguments, Cuiffo said that he enjoyed having Hnath as a collaborator and goad.“He strategically broke down all that [expletive] I usually do,” Cuiffo said.Making illusions without any of the patter, the showmanship, the razzle-dazzle? That, he has learned, is a kind of magic, too. More

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      ‘A Simulacrum’ Review: A Magic Show in the Making, and Unmaking

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      The magician Steve Cuiffo and the playwright Lucas Hnath try to find the reality beneath the illusions in this Atlantic Theater Company production.Magicians often get a bad rap. After all, it’s a profession necessarily defined by deception.But what are some of these untruths in magic, and what are they meant to obscure? That’s what the playwright Lucas Hnath and the magician Steve Cuiffo explore in “A Simulacrum,” a kind of deconstructed magic show that attempts to find the reality beneath the illusions.At the start of “A Simulacrum,” directed by Hnath and produced by Atlantic Theater Company, Cuiffo strolls onstage to one of two large folding tables that are positioned perpendicular to each other. He puts down his drink and pops a tape into a cassette recorder.It’s Tuesday, Aug. 10, 2021, at an East Village rehearsal studio, where Hnath and Cuiffo are workshopping a possible show. Rather, this production is a re-creation of that Aug. 10 workshop. (An author’s note in the script calls it a “stage documentary.”) Hnath is the unseen interviewer; his parts, questioning Cuiffo’s methods and history with magic, are culled from over 50 hours of workshops and interviews between them, and played aloud — presumably via the recorder. Cuiffo performs his tricks in person and acts out his side of the conversation, which has been taken verbatim from these workshops.The second act of the show, which was commissioned by the Center Theater Group in Los Angeles, replicates a workshop Hnath and Cuiffo had three months after the first, during which Hnath challenges Cuiffo to devise new tricks with a set of criteria that negate or undercut the illusion, polish and showmanship that typically define magic shows. The third act, based on another workshop a year later, reveals Cuiffo’s creations.Cuiffo makes it clear that this show presents “presentational magic,” not “personal magic” — that is, the staging is more one-sided, absent the transactional element that comes with audience participation. It’s just an aside, but it epitomizes how the show moves, from a more traditional magic show format, with disappearing coins and autonomous cards that jump and flip on and around his person, to something more intimate.Hnath’s blunt interrogations (“Where is Steve in this?”) and matter-of-fact reactions (“That’s it?” he asks after Cuiffo performs a card trick that took him 14 years to master), though sometimes difficult to hear with the tape’s poor sound quality, reveal an incisive thinker. That should be no surprise to those familiar with his work, like “The Thin Place,” a kind of ghost story, and “Dana H.,” another simulacrum involving a real, harrowing story about Hnath’s mother that is lip-synced to a recording of her recounting the experience. (It remains one of the most unforgettable experiences I’ve had in a theater.) And yet, at times this production too explicitly spells out his conceit, as when Hnath questions how much of Cuiffo’s magic is mimicry, each trick being a variation of a theme — yes, a simulacrum.Ultimately this is a show with an intentionally self-defeating concept: One that breaks down the artifice of an art form by employing another art form that uses a similar kind of artifice to reveal some aspect of humanity. But there’s an occasional tediousness to this behind-the-scenes, making-of endeavor, and a few moments of built-in dissatisfaction, as when Cuiffo has to perform tricks that he knows won’t work.An engaging performer, Cuiffo subverts the splashy style that many professional magicians are known for; he’s low-key, grounded in both his gestures and his manner of speech. And the difficulty of what he’s doing shouldn’t be understated: He’s not just repeating his part of the dialogue but replicating his pauses, cadence, emphases naturally and in sync with Hnath’s audio.As carefully considered as this production is, with Louisa Thompson’s modest scenic design (two tables, an office-window backdrop) and Hnath’s cerebral direction, ultimately there is still the sense that something is missing: a deeper interrogation of Cuiffo and Hnath himself, something even more personal. We never get the full reveal.What magic and theater have in common is the wonder, the spectacle that ironically sends you back to your reality with a new outlook. But maintaining the magic while showing your hand? That’s the trick this show hasn’t quite yet mastered.A SimulacrumThrough July 2 at Atlantic Stage 2, Manhattan; atlantictheater.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More