Mindplay
November 13 to December 1, 2024
Calderwood Pavilion, Boston
December 15, 2024 to April 20, 2025
Greenwich House Theater, New York City
A few minutes into Mindplay, mentalist Vinny DePonto asks the question hanging from the curtain beyond him. “What’s on your mind?” He answers his own question in Big Brother fashion. “When someone knows this, they can control you.”
Then, through ninety minutes and a dozen or so audience members (selected at random from a fish bowl of the envelopes each audience member completed and sealed before entering the theatre), Vinny proceeds to control our minds. Or, at least, peer into them with chilling accuracy.
Mindplay has a vintage, vaudevillian sensibility—grainy black and white slide projections, cassette recordings, tales of a billiard-loving grandmother and magic-teaching grandfather—coupled with 21st century neurology. Vinny accompanies his mental machinations with a fair smattering of how our brains work. And how they don’t. And how they work in ways we don’t understand.
His sleights of mind are amazing. The audience gasps again and again when volunteers confirm that he’s correctly mined their minds. Vinny convinces one volunteer that her empty right arm is supporting a bucket of water, her left a balloon; and her arms lower and rise accordingly. He slows his pulse to zero; we see him grow chill. Then he slides behind a stage curtain and reappears at the rear of the theater quicker than Star Trek could beam him up. The most impressive trick, to me, involved two volunteers sitting opposite lengths of a table. Vinny cajoled thoughts from one, and shifted them, somehow, to the other. Returning to the original, he then lightly touched her, while the other volunteer felt the pinch.
Merely describing these feats in words dissipates the wonder of the experience. My mind was at play the entire time trying to understand the what and where and how of his magic.
When the curtain parts to display an impressive set of gunmetal grey steel file drawers, representing how we store information, Mindplay feels like an actual play. Vinny roves among the data depositories, extracting all manner of cranial curiosities. Drawers ring and glow and shake. He climbs among them like a jungle gym. All the while extolling neurological delights.
The final segment, back before the curtain, is—sadly—the most unsettling. Vinny extracts some difficult memories from a lovely older woman, who winds up crying onstage. Whether this is typical of all performances, or was singular to ours, I’ll never know. But it felt unnecessary, in the least; exploitative, at best.
Nevertheless, the after-show vibe in the theater lobby was unlike any I’ve witnessed. People clustered around the various volunteers, inquiring whether they were plants (they were not) and whether all that they said and did onstage was true. I met the woman who reacted to being touched, even when Vinny was touching someone else. Did she actually feel those pinches? Yes, she confirmed, she did.
Oh, and did I mention ice cream? There’s a through line about ice cream from first scene to last. One of the volunteers admits to craving strawberry. And there, in the lobby, for all to enjoy at the end of the show, were hundreds of little dishes of…strawberry ice cream from J.P Licks. By this time my mind was blown so wide open, I simply swallowed down the sweet, delicious stuff.
Mindplay is not much longer in Boston. But the show is moving to an extended run in New York. If you can’t catch it here, perhaps Vinny DePonto can teleport you there.
The Awkward Pose 