A Spirited Romp to 1926 with ‘The Girl Who Handcuffed Houdini’ (The NoPro Review)

by Kathryn Yu
Kathryn Yu
•
October 8, 2018
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5 min read

Speakeasy Dollhouse’s latest takes us into the seductive world of private eye Minky Woodcock

Well, Minky’s not gonna get out of this one alive… I thought to myself.

Private eye Minky Woodcock (played by the magnetic, charismatic Pearls Daily), having gone undercover as Harry Houdini’s newest assistant, finds herself submerged in several feet of water. She floats in front of us, struggling to free herself from a pair of handcuffs. Minky grimaces behind glass as the entire audience holds its collective breath; unfortunately, the Great Houdini (a smug Vincent Cinque) had been mysteriously injured at a previous performance, and this was the only way the show could go on.

As Minky flails in the water, Houdini’s assistant, the swarthy Jim Collins (Mat Leonard playing a muscle man who looks to be straight of central casting), begins to worry. He holds a sledgehammer which could presumably crack the glass and free Minky with a single swing. But doing this would also flood the first few rows of the theater, and ruin the show. Houdini continues to stall, believing Minky should be able to find her way out of the handcuffs.

After all, they’d rehearsed this, hadn’t they?

The two duke it out as Minky struggles behind them and the clock keeps ticking, ticking, ticking — then suddenly, there she is, gasping for breath in her one piece bathing suit, perched at the top of the water torture chamber, without a single pin curl astray.

Minky had escaped. This time.

Speakeasy Dollhouse’s The Girl Who Handcuffed Houdini, based upon the graphic novel of the same name, plunges audiences into a stylish Jazz Age-era world of magic and mystery. We follow amateur private detective Minky Woodcock as she tackles her first, very complicated case: to discover whether Harry Houdini is cheating on his wife Bess (Robyn Adele Anderson, who you might know from Postmodern Jukebox) or secretly has some form of supernatural powers, a theory held by the author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (played by Lord Kat). Perhaps even both possibilities are true.

Minky’s a headstrong, opinionated woman with a mind of her own and a penchant for saying what she thinks, which doesn’t appear to be appreciated by the rest of society. She’s becomes a skeptic of spiritualism after witnessing an over-the-top seancé put on by the medium Margery of Boston (an eerie, voluptuous Veronica Varlow) who calls upon her long dead brother to communicate with the living. A conjuring that must be conducted while Margery is in the nude.

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“Banana oil,” Minky proclaims.

And, indeed, Harry Houdini believes the same. He has taken upon himself the responsibility of debunking that very same Margery of Boston. He’s been publicly calling out many of these spiritualists as fakes and phonies. In fact, it would appears that multiple persons might wish to do him harm, seeing as he’s been cutting into their profits through his work.

The experience of The Girl Who Handcuffed Houdini is described as a look into Houdini’s final days before his suspicious death. The audience is split into multiple tracks, where they’re chaperoned by a set of two characters for the majority of their experience. The design is intended to have the audience members witness events from a single character’s point of view, with the VIP tickets placing members of the audience with Margery, Minky, or Houdini.

Every character in Houdini seems to be straight out of an old timey movie, from the smart-talking cop to the sleezy lawyer and there’s plenty of booze and jazz to go around. Some characters wander the world making quips and asides or conversing with the audience as the story unfolds. And when two characters happen to pass one another leading their respective groups, they acknowledge each other’s presence, as if this were the most natural thing in the world. The audience-to-performer ratio makes the experience both intimate and interactive; my group of seven people found ourselves either shadowed by Jim Collins or briskly following Houdini the entire time, and we also had the ability to speak to some of the other characters during transitory scenes. The clever design of the show uses multiple floors of a single townhouse in the East Village, as we move seamlessly from a speakeasy next door to a creepy upstairs parlor to Minky’s hotel room, as well as a traditional theater space where we can observe Houdini performing for audiences around the globe.

The play ostensibly centers around Houdini and his death, but I found difficult to invest in Houdini as a character, knowing he was a carefree, serial womanizer who was destined to die at some point during the show. Houdini galavants about the country without any real sense of danger. I wished for more suspense and higher stakes built into the narrative as it unfolded, leading to a stronger payoff. (There’s also an extra level of difficulty when the audience knows what’s going to happen to your character before you do. I suspect the other tracks of the show don’t suffer quite as much from this imbalance of information.) And the twists and turns of the plot lack context dependent upon what you have or haven’t seen. Because each group is essentially on “rails” the entire time, there’s no way to see what else is happening in parallel with Minky, Bess, or the spiritualists. We simply rarely encounter their perspectives due to the design of the show — an unfortunate flaw.

That said, scenes involving escapes from the water torture chamber are thrilling to see up close and there are few other magical surprises in store for the observant audience member. And we’re left wondering about Minky’s fate in all of this as she digs deeper and deeper into the circumstances surrounding Houdini’s odd death. Luckily for all of us, Daily’s performance is compelling enough to propel the piece forward even after Houdini’s inevitable demise.

Woodcock is the beating heart of the show as she infiltrates Houdini’s organization, exposes spiritualist fakery, and attempts to prove her worth as an investigator. The tantalizing environment of The Girl Who Handcuffed Houdini makes time seem to fly by. Despite knowing pretty much what’s going to happen to Houdini, it’s altogether too easy to get lost in this alluring world of mysterious magicians, strong cocktails, shady lawyers, eerie mediums, and private detectives, as they drift through the night in their sleek dresses and sharp suits.

The Girl Who Handcuffed Houdini continues at Theatre 80 through November 10. Tickets are $100–200.

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