Creating a card magic act

In February, I performed my show “Mysteries at the Card Table” in the Out of the Dark Festival at Penn. It was a ton of fun and the most “theatrical” act that I’ve written. I just wanted to reflect on my experience.

Writing

My starting point was that I wanted to weave a story of someone, a biography show of sorts. At the beginning, my conception of the idea is a fictional gambler in the 20s who eventually got killed after being caught. I have a special affinity for card cheating/gambling demos, so I thought this would finally be an opportunity perform an effect of that nature on stage. However, I realized that I didn’t have to make a fictional character at all. Someone arguably more interesting already existed in real life: SW Erdnase.

Like many card mechanics, I had studied Erdnase (I highly recommend Vernon’s Revelations), so I was vaguely aware of the story. But I didn’t know that there was so much literature to read on who Erdnase was. Though my show pointed to Milton Franklin Andrews being Erdnase, after reading Darwin Ortiz’s account, I am not quite convinced.

I presented the first part of my show as a demonstration of the contents in the Expert at the Card Table (with caveats). I honestly love this idea of a magic show being a presentation of a magic book. It reminds of college courses based on a textbook. Of course, the caveat is that you may just be blatantly exposing where to find the method in the process, but I think it worked for Erdnase as it was specifically a demonstration of skill.

Since this was a demonstration of concepts in a book, I thought it would be cool for the book itself to be a prop. That’s when I remember Joshua Jay’s fantastic routine Any Card at Any Page. I absolutely love this book and it makes perfect use of a logical prop for a show that is about a particular book.

Performing

It was a fun journey figuring it how to present this after I had the script. The main difficulty was figuring it how to do card magic on stage. We ended up having a camera and a screen, which was a first for me. So huge thanks to Brooke O’Harra and the TAC-e people for all the help. Brooke in particular gave me some great feedback on performance. One of my favorite parts of the show was actually even at the beginning. Because I was the opening act, we had the idea to have me “reading” the Expert at the Card Table as the audience was coming in. Shout out to that one person in the front row who said “bro is locked in.” I think the aesthetic that it created was cool and think made my transition into the show more intriguing. “It’s a book so I should read it” was the thought I had. I think actually using a prop in an intended way (which magicians rarely do) gives the object extra element of intrigue when it is actually used for a magical purpose later on.

My biggest mistake was on my last night, I made a faro mistake, messing up the stack. (I had to do 5 faros in a row while delivering a monologue. Not an easy task.) What I ended up doing was manually arranging the deck in a specific order while the audience was looking at it. I think this actually made sense because the final effect was a full deck match, which means the effect became “I arrange a deck to match a spectator shuffled deck perfectly.” I think if anything, it actually may have boosted the drama of it. Talking to the audience members later on, I realized that they thought it was an intentional part of the show.

Final Thoughts

I loved performing and my big realization was that I should do more theatrical magic and explore more ways that magic can aid a story instead of coming up with a story to fit the magic.