Arena Stage is busy celebrating having the most-nominated musical (“Swept Away”) and most-nominated play (“Angels in America”) in this week’s Helen Hayes Award nominations.
But that doesn’t mean the prestigious theater is slowing down on staging exciting new work in the nation’s capital.
Enter acclaimed mentalist Vinny DePonto, creator and star of “Mindplay,” which runs now through March 3.
“I hope it’s a sort of Rorschach test where everyone has a different experience,” DePonto told WTOP. “It is a solo mentalism show, but the audience very much drives the show. It is a participatory show, they are my scene partner and it’s different every single night because of it. … Different audiences bring different things to the table. One of the conceits of the show is to say, ‘What’s on your mind?,’ so whatever you come in that door with.”
Running 80 minutes without intermission, “Mindplay” blurs the line between illusion and reality.
“I don’t mind if you call it a magical show; actually, it is magical, but I stick with ‘mentalism’ or ‘mind reader’ because, to be honest, it provokes more thought than just a magician,” DePonto said. “With a magician, people often think of a rabbit-out-of-a-hat kid’s magician. … I like to think a mentalist is a type of performer that uses tools like theater, magic and psychology to create an experience that centers around the power of one’s thoughts.”
Not only does he read the minds of audiences, he promises to tap into their deepest memories.
“I love the expansiveness and the fragility of one’s memory,” DePonto said. “We explore a vaudeville performer by the name of Solomon Shereshevsky, who was a Russian synesthesia, who was not able to forget anything. I found that really fascinating … We talk about memory techniques that a typical mind can use to expand one’s memories. One idea is a ‘memory palace’ where you can learn a spacial technique to memorize lots of information.”
Growing up in Dobbs Ferry, New York, DePonto first experienced magic when his father found a shoe box of old magic tricks and mind-reading tools from the 1930s and 1940s that belonged to his grandfather.
“It was his father’s, who I never got to meet, he passed away when my dad was young,” DePonto said. “My dad took out the shoe box and started messing with the tricks and showing me. I was 7 years old and fascinated by it. We built a tradition where my dad would do these tricks at Thanksgiving, then I would do them more than he would, and every year I would think about how I could share a show for my family to share at Thanksgiving.”
He later studied psychology and theater in college, which ultimately led him to mentalism.
“Mentalism sort of fell into place,” DePonto said. “One of the things that I liked most about it was that it dealt with audience’s thoughts. It wasn’t just about sleight of hand or making something disappear, but something far more interesting, which is the idiosyncrasies and stories of people. That’s what I love about it and that’s how I got here.”
In 2014, DePonto earned a Drama Desk Award nomination for Unique Theatrical Experience for his one-man show “Charlatan” before creating “Mindplay” in 2018. He’s also worked behind the scenes on various TV shows, including NBC’s “Best Time Ever,” Discovery Channel’s “Magic of Science” and Netflix’s “Magic for Humans,” while consulting on Broadway productions like “Angels in America” that rely on elaborate visual effects.
“I was asked to assist in bringing ‘Angels in America’ over to Broadway and sort of adjusting and collaborating with production to build the illusions into the show,” DePonto said. “They obviously weren’t overt magic tricks; they were tricks and illusions that weren’t built into the storytelling of the show.”
And just like that, we’ve come full circle back to Arena Stage’s production of “Angels in America.” Will it win Outstanding Play at the Helen Hayes Awards? Will “Swept Away” likewise take Outstanding Musical?
Only DePonto can read voters’ minds.
Listen to our full conversation here.
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