Ricky Jay: On the Stem (review)

Ricky Jay's On the Stem is a new departure for the perennially sold-out prestidigitator. Word in professional magic circles was that the show wasn't as exciting as Ricky Jay and His 52 Assistants. Watching On the Stem, it is easy to see why magic buffs might be disappointed. Jay showcases far fewer of his signature feats of card manipulation, even the ever popular card throwing; instead, he spends much of his time doing what he does in his books—documenting the history of American popular entertainment.

Those who consider Jay a magician or card sharp are often surprised to find how little of his material is original. Most of his tricks, complete with patter, can be found in classic texts such as the 1902 cheater's manual, The Expert at the Card Table. Jay is not as interested in creating new tricks as he is in reminding us of the old ones. On the Stem surfaces this documentary drive: the piece is a compendium of the tricks, buffooneries, cons, and sideshows that make up the marvelous margins of American theatre history.

On the Stem zeros in on Broadway, the "Stem" of the title. Soliloquizing in front of an unrolling panorama of the Great White Way, Jay functions as time-traveling tour guide, leading the audience beyond legitimate theatre to explore Broadway's other legacy. With little fanfare, he transforms into a variety of carnival barkers, candy hawkers, card sharps, and shysters who have gone largely unnoticed in official accounts of the theatre. His skillful recreations serve a dual purpose: even as they entertain and amaze, they demonstrate the vibrancy and legitimacy of this branch of theatrical history. Cheap tricks? No, this is performance at its best. It has excitement, suspense, skill, and emotional engagement. You'll never look at a three-card monte guy in quite the same way again.

Addressing popular entertainment, Jay has cast a wider net than in previous performances. He plays rounds of poker and demonstrates sleight-of-hand skill, but he also juggles eggs, forges signatures, operates a flea circus, and tells stories. Hard core fansmight see some of these tricks as beneath his talents. As a competent professional magician, why should Jay lower himself to telling a moving story about a blind man who thinks he owns a collection of Audubon prints, when the story's only trick is a simple palming of the notebook to make the prints disappear?

The answer is because it's good theatre. Skillful as he is, Jay has never really been simply a magician or con man. Even his more impressive feats are often, upon consideration, less than astounding. In one segment of On the Stem, for instance, he moves a knight through every square of a supersizedchess board without landing on the same square twice, beginning at a spot chosen by an audience member. Simultaneously, he calls out Appalachian field hollers, quotes Shakespeare from plays chosen by audience members, and calculates cube roots of large numbers called out randomly from a list. Each component of this mental mastermind demonstration is rather straightforward: the knight's tour, for instance, simply requires memorizing a sixty-four-move sequence that—like the London Underground's Circle Line—follows the same sequence of stops regardless of where one begins. Cube roots are easily calculated for large numbers since the final digit of the number reveals the root's final digit; once you have memorized the correspondences, it is simply a matter of estimating to within ten. And most drama critics, let alone actors, can rattle off long passages of Shakespeare. What is impressive here is not the skill behind the tricks; it's the showmanship that brings them to life. Magic is the art of making the difficult look easy, but it is also the art of making the easy look difficult. Just as his poker patter takes your eye off the hand...