Vinny DePonto uses tape cassettes, family stories, and gifts of mentalism to explore memories and thoughts in his interactive show Mindplay. Photograph by Chris Ruggiero. (Banner photograph by Jeff Lorch.)
The cover photo of Stagelight, the playbill for Mindplay, shows Vinny DePonto, its star (and co-writer, with Josh Koenigsberg) with a swarthy, tight-lipped, foreboding visage. He might easily have just emerged from a coffin in Transylvania, but, thankfully, on stage DePonto is engaging, earnest and unthreatening. In explaining the raison d’être of his show, he mentions his own anxieties, including being subject to panic attacks. “Your mind takes over your body if you’re one of those people,” he says. “I’m one of those people.”
DePonto holds the hands of an audience member in order to plug into her thoughts.
The show launches with the telephone ringing, the instruction “Answer it” projected on the curtain behind the stage, and a spotlight on an audience member. Bravely, a woman named Barbara answers the phone (presumably talking to DePonto). She finds and reads from a paper, then crumples it and throws it backward into the audience as if it were a bridal bouquet. As it happened, my companion David ended up with the crumpled paper, and, standing, was asked to name a color. David answered, “Red,” and sure enough, Barbara, still on the phone with DePonto, revealed the word Red hidden beneath one of the stage objects.
“Oh, how we fear the things we can’t control,” says DePonto, entering dressed in gray slacks, a tweed jacket, and a patterned pocket square and taking control. The show blends personal memoir, baffling deductions about what his chosen participants are thinking, and a kind of TED talk that touches on everything from thought manipulation to ruminating cows.
“I’ve invited you here to do a show about thoughts,” DePonto announces. “But I’ve gotten a few complaints about using mind-control techniques,” he adds, so he cheekily offers to let anyone who is uncomfortable with that leave and “go out into the world where there’s no mind control.” A warm presence, DePonto gently coaxes folks to the stage, which is furnished with a desk that has a gooseneck lamp, a holder with pens and pencils, and a telephone. There are also a brown leather swivel chair and a slide projector on a low table. (Set design is by Sibyl Wickersheimer.)
One routine involves DePonto brewing a tea with an unhappy memory and using shadow play to transfer the thought and eliminate it.
DePonto begins by talking about a childhood nightmare of an endless room of steel doors and coming across Solomon Shereshevsky (1886-1958), “who could remember everything: every word, every comment said to him, every thought.” He describes Shereshevsky’s technique of creating a “memory palace.” It’s “a place of mental sticky notes,” DePonto explains. “My memory palace of choice is called Nelli’s pool hall”—a tribute to his grandparents, Italian immigrants surnamed Finelli. “Memories can be stored in places and objects,” he adds, so that one can put the notes anywhere in the safe space.
Three techniques of mind control are very real, says DePonto: “Your thoughts, your beliefs, and your memories are being manipulated. … We never think alone.” He demonstrates by asking a woman to hold out her arms parallel, hands up, with eyes closed. In one hand, he tells her, she’s holding helium balloons; in the other a heavy object. The arm with the “heavy object” sinks lower than the one with the balloons.
Startling visuals enhance the show, which is directed by Andrew Neisler—at one point the curtain falls, revealing walls of numbered drawers lighted eerily in a sort of indigo by Christopher Bowser. They echo the nightmare of steel doors from DePonto’s childhood. He opens the drawers, and at one point, using them as a ladder, clambers up the opened ones to retrieve contents of a drawer. At times, though, the visuals feel intrusive: frenetic moments with cassette tapes and the contents of drawers muddy the connections to be made. At others, as with a delicately choreographed teapot sequence in which DePonto, using shadow play, pours the “thoughts” of one person into the head of another, the effect is charming.
Despite the physical business and unusual visuals, the elements involving the mind are still the most mysterious. To this layman, several of DePonto’s solutions had to require “plants” in the audience, but no, avers my neighbor Alex, a young magician who saw the show: “There are no ‘plants.’”
With one woman, DePonto managed to pinpoint a happy memory that she held of a beach trip in Montenegro. Later in the show he discerned a woman’s sad memory of diamond earrings left her by her beloved mother-in-law, who had recently passed away. For another woman, he guessed that her memory palace was under her pillow. Her thought, he surmised, “has to do with safety and freedom.” Looking at her directly, he said, “She’s thinking of getting her own place.” The woman acknowledged it was true.
Mindplay runs at the Greenwich House Theater (27 Barrow St.) through April 20. Evening performances are at 7 p.m. Thursday and Friday, and Sunday through Tuesday, and at 9 p.m. on Saturday; matinees are at 5 p.m. Saturday and 2 p.m. Sunday. (Check for exceptions for holidays.) For tickets and more information, visit mindplaynyc.com.
Writers: Vinnie DePonto & Josh Koenigsberg
Director: Andrew Neisler
Set Design: Sibyl Wickersheimer
Lighting Design: Christopher Bowser
Sound Design: Kathy Ruvuna
Music: Alex Harris
