Geoff Sobelle’s Elephant Room brought the hidden world of magicians and their craft to the 2011 Philadelphia Live Arts Festival. We spoke to Sobelle in September about his roots in magic, working at clubs in Los Angeles, and how the glitz and glam of Las Vegas magicians took a backseat when it came to devising this production: “We realized that there was something else underneath the world of magic that was more interesting to us than a straight satire of the greatest hits on the Tropicana strip. A kind of human, geeky quality of dreamers, has-beens and would-bes […] that might posture, front and pretend that they are one thing—but actually, they might be something else entirely.”

In our post-festival chat, Sobelle expressed his gratitude for the response to Elephant Room and the role that Live Arts played in the production.

Elephant Room
2011 Theatre Grantee

September 2–17 (check link below for times)
Plays and Players Theatre
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“When I was a kid, I joined two magic clubs in LA. One was called the Magic Castle, and it hosted (and still does) acts by some of the best magicians in the world. Kids that joined at a young age sometimes went on to become quite well-known magicians and were, frankly, awesome. Then there was the magic club that was sort of sponsored by the Boy Scouts of America. It was an ‘explorer post,’ and as I got more and more into this club, I would receive merit badges for anything from ‘history’ to ‘technical skills,’ to ‘community outreach.’ This one was kind of sad and not very well populated. It was in the basement of a Home Savings and Loan on the corners of Hollywood and Vine streets in Los Angeles. This was not the place where you would ever expect to find a club of any sort, let alone the Society of American Magicians Hall of Fame and Magic Museum. Two floors beneath the busy streets, there was an enormous basement, converted to a little theatre with red seats, a stage, a little operating booth. And then, the museum. The museum had exhibits of magicians throughout history, starting with some guy doing the cups and balls tricks dressed in a toga to the glorious 19th-century magicians: Houdini, Thurston, Kellar. The exhibits were all handmade; some of them were mannequins with cheap wigs and moth-eaten costumes, some looked like mummies [or] papier maché dolls. Everything was done with great love and exuberance, and unless you were a member of the Society of American Magicians, loved the history of magic, or were roped into going to an evening hosted by someone there, chances are you would never go there. This was a basement world that took itself very seriously, but that virtually no one knew existed.

“The man who created this place was a past national president of the SAM. He was a terrible magician and an exceedingly boring performer, but he was passionate about history and about the art of magic. He lived alone, and was a history teacher for the gifted and talented program at a local high school. He wrote a recommendation for me to get into college. He wrote the whole thing in pencil. In all capital letters. It came promptly, was clearly unedited, and contained outrageous spelling mistakes. He taught me how to coil a rope, how to rewind a tape cassette to precisely where you would need it for your music to begin, and that a magic trick involving a beer bottle, which was highly inappropriate for a 14-year old. He was a quiet man who looked something like a bird, and was quite controlled. Sometimes, though, when his buddy was forbidden to come to the club by his wife, he would fly into a passionate rage. Later he would condemn the Boy Scouts of America for considering involving gay boys in boy scouts events. I knew very little about this man, but he was the first real eccentric that I ever met and spent time with. I only ever saw him in a tuxedo or black suit. He was a magician, not by trade, but by DNA.”

—Geoff Sobelle

Photo by Greg Costanzo. 

Elephant Room
2011 Theatre Grantee

September 2–17 (check link below for times)
Plays and Players Theatre
Buy Tickets

“I love magic. It's a ridiculous pastime. It takes hours and hours of dedicated work to pull off about 30 seconds of material. It is extremely difficult, and if it doesn't work, it doesn't work. I think I'm kind of interested in the unfair work to payoff ratio; it's a bit like the theatre, actually. And in other ways, too—there is a kind of outward show thinly masking a whole ballet of technical tricks that an audience should never even know exists. And in that way, I think it's a great and absurd metaphor for performance.

“When I was a kid, this was the only thing that I really knew, so it has always informed the way that I think about the theatre and about performance in general—something about your body and your mind doing two different things simultaneously. Holding attention with one hand and focusing it with the other. I like how mechanical it is, how lo-fi it is, and handmade. Elephant Room is the first magic show that I've ever made, though. When we began working on the show, we were interested in the glitz glam shazam of the Las Vegas magicians, like Lance Burton or David Copperfield. But as we got deeper into it, we realized that there was something else underneath the world of magic that was more interesting to us than a straight satire of the greatest hits on the Tropicana strip. A kind of human, geeky quality of dreamers, has-beens and would-bes that stand in for the part of us (meaning the creators) that might posture, front and pretend that they are one thing—but actually, they might be something else entirely. They guard secrets. Secrets that they may not even know exist.”

—Geoff Sobelle

Photo by Greg Costanzo.

Photo by Jay Dunn

Did you miss Chicken at the Philadelphia Live Arts Festival?  You’ve got another chance to see the show Charlotte Ford developed and produced with the help of a 2009 Philadelphia Theatre Initiative grant.  Geoff Sobelle (2006 Pew Fellow in the Arts) directs two performances, Friday and Saturday at Bryn Mawr College’s Hepburn Theater. Read on for more info.

A nuclear-powered submarine carries three government workers in charge of a classified mission. Perhaps it’s the recycled air that has pushed them to pursue each other’s destruction. Devising absurd plots of revenge has become their greatest amusement. Chicken is an expressionistic clown play that magnifies our most intimate fears.

Chicken
Bryn Mawr College
Hepburn Theater, Goodhart Hall
Bryn Mawr
October 1 and 2, 2010 at 8 p.m.

Buy tickets >
Learn about Philadelphia Theatre Initiative’s 2009 grant to Charlotte Ford to develop and produce Chicken> 
See more about Geoff Sobelle, director of Chicken and 2006 Pew Fellow >