When Vinny DePonto was a student at Manhattanville University, he really wanted to major in magic. But that wasn’t an option, so he created his own course of study, combining theater and psychology into a major he called psychology of performance art.
“I used a little trickery to major in magic,” DePonto, 38, recalled during a recent interview at a West Village coffee shop.
The intersection of stage and psyche is where DePonto takes audiences in his mentalist show “Mindplay,” directed by Andrew Neisler and running through April 20 at the Greenwich House Theater. In it, DePonto alternates between tender remembrances of growing up in a close-knit Italian American family in Dobbs Ferry, N.Y., and seemingly supernatural feats that involve him calling audience members onto the stage to talk about their most personal memories.
During the performance I attended, sniffles and gasps could be heard around the theater as DePonto, who wrote the show with Josh Koenigsberg, sat across from a man and discerned details about the man’s dead father and his beloved harmonica.
DePonto has been reading minds for roughly 20 years, and he has cited as inspiration Ricky Jay, the renowned magician and mentalist who died in 2018. He said he caught the magic bug as a boy when his father gave him a shoe box of disappearing handkerchief-style tricks.
He eventually gravitated toward mind reading — a trick, he said, that’s not just for magicians.
“I’m not so much reading thoughts,” he said. “I’m planting a thought. Thoughts are planted in our heads every single day.”
DePonto also talked about finding magic in storytelling, storytelling about magic and the dangers of mind control. These are edited excerpts from our conversation.
Let’s start with the basics. What is mentalism?
Mentalism is a genre of magic that deals in people’s thoughts: mind reading, clairvoyance, predictions, telepathy. Magic arguably always involves the audience’s thoughts, but my show uses the thoughts of the audience to assist in telling the story. The way the world is colored in our mind is through our memories. I wanted to build the story on that, on asking the audience, what is meaningful to you?
Why did you want the audience to be so involved?
I have a deep interest in the human mind. I’m using tricks in the show, but the tricks lead to deeper moments that I would label as magical. I’m a theater maker at heart.
You would think, being onstage, people would be more closed off. But there’s something about it being a safe, imaginary space. I’ve gotten to a place where I can’t talk about the mind without talking about empathy or trauma or the ways in which our minds are shaped.
That’s not something I ever thought I’d do in my performance career. I always thought I’d razzle-dazzle. This approach was an attempt to find my voice. I made the show as a way to process some things.
Like what?
Loss. I think of my grandparents but also the people who come up onstage and share a deeply personal moment that I can’t shake.
We all have invisible battles in our head that no one else sees. Mine just happened to be from childhood and having generalized anxiety disorder. I’d be in the hospital every week. No one knew what that was. I was like, “Someone please tell me what this is.” And someone finally told me: “It’s your mind.” I was like, “Oh OK.” I still regress into those moments of feeling utter panic.
Do you think the show resonates differently now that the country’s made a political shift?
It’s not a coincidence. It’s purposeful. I started thinking about the idea of mind control in 2015. We are dealing with a master propagandist [referring to President Trump], somebody who is pulling the strings and using the media to tell his story. “Is he going to become president?” was the big question at the time. Then 2016 rolled around and I was doing a version of this show and we were talking a lot about how you are controlled by the world.
That led me to think about how we control ourselves, how we truly get cemented in our own POV of the world and can’t get out of it, and how that wall we build is fortified by people who continually tell us lies. It was right around the time that he got into office. Here we are again.
Then what do you do with that, once you become so focused. What’s next?
When you’re doing that you’re letting that control you. That’s what they want. They want you to live in that powerless state of fear and anxiety. That’s just not helpful.
How do you deal with audience members who think they are going to trick you onstage?
Because everyone is chosen at random, I can’t look into the audience and see smiling, open people and be like, “You come up and help me!” The biggest thing I have to remind myself of is, don’t write those people off. There is some deep thought in there that’s driving that judgment or alpha male whatever it is. Don’t give up on that person. I try to match them and their energy but be like: “You’re OK. I’m not going to embarrass you.” That helps melt that stuff away.
You keep using the word trick. Is that what you do?
There’s this debate in the magic community. I say tricks because I believe that tricks don’t dilute the magic that tricks can create. They are theatrical tricks, psychological tricks that I use to create a world of magic. I’m not going to try to be high art about it. They’re tricks.
There’s one trick you did that’s flummoxing. You guessed correctly that a guy onstage with you was hearing John Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme” in his head. That’s not possible to know.
Can I ask you a question?
Sure.
How does that feel for you?
Confused, like you are supernatural. It’s a kind of creepy awe.
Awe is a big one. We don’t have enough of it in our lives because we have answers in our pockets every moment of the day. We didn’t always have that. I want to get back to a place where we are incorporating more awe in our lives.
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