A hundred years ago, death was closer than it is now. Penicillin was two years away. The Civil War was within living memory. The Great War had just ended. So you can’t blame that generation for imagining that the Ouija Board – a fun parlor game until then – might actually let you commune with all the loved ones you had lost.
That’s the world of Constellation’s new show, Séance: The Board Awakens, which opened at the Waldron on January 30. As you walk into the theater, jazz plays quietly and smoke drifts through the air. The set is impressive: a warehouse with broken-down brick walls, wooden crates scattered; a painter’s ladder; a wall, plaster peeling, with smaller portraits surrounding one large one. I thought, at first, the large one was James Joyce. (It wasn’t, but if you want to picture the picture, picture Joyce.) An old, faded sign that says Wm. Penn & Sons hangs over the center of the set. There’s a table with a Ouija Board on it. An exposed I-beam crosses over the audience. Even the overhead lights for the seating are period-specific. (With the seating on risers and no center aisle, getting to the middle seats was tricky.)
The show starts with the lights going out. When they come back up, a man has appeared with a dead body in front of him. The living man is middle-aged, in a black suit with a thin tie, black hair, and black browline glasses. The dead man is under a sheet, on a table.
The man, our host (and emcee and narrator and magician) is played by Rob Zabrecky. Zabrecky is a writer, actor, and award-winning close-up magician from LA. Onstage, he tells us what’s happened: Walter Penn (I know, the sign says Wm. A William gets mentioned too – I missed the detail that would have explained the connection.) was the owner of a Ouija board factory, but he’s recently fallen to his death from the roof. It’s now our project to try to get in touch with the spirits and figure out what happened.
As our host (spoiler: he’s the only performer, and he doesn’t give us his name) tells the story, he walks around the stage, starting with a few simple papercutting tricks: a set of paper dolls, a few cuts in a folded paper that unfolds to reveal a relevant word. The magic gets increasingly elaborate. He elicits audience participation. People think of random numbers and they turn out to add up to something significant. He passes out black velvet bags to collect important objects from trusting audience members.
Objects float mysteriously. An audience member and an assistant tie up our host’s arms with ropes, then tie his ankles to a chair. Then, while he’s behind a painter’s tarp on a scaffold, seemingly impossible things happen.
In between these illusions, our host continues to share the story, including background on the Ouija Board and its context. He weaves together historical fact and narrative fiction, with the person who turned the Ouija board into a commercial product being Walter Penn’s original boss, not the real businessman Elijah Bond. The historical fact lends the fictional narrative a satisfying veracity, though the story (a rags-to-riches trajectory for Walter Penn, where he ousts his former boss as owner of the company and marries his brother’s fiancée) relies on tropes that might have felt fresher in the 1920s than the 2020s.
Throughout the narration and magic tricks, music came in and out, underscoring the changes in mood and activity. Perfectly-timed sound effects played in different places throughout the theater. The sound design was immersive, as was the lighting.
After intermission, a large table has appeared on the stage. After a few more illusions, our host invites eight audience members to sit around the table for the séance itself. I won’t reveal what happened during the séance, but I will warn that it involved a couple of sudden loud noises and flashes of light. The special effects were the star at this point. It was spookily fun and showed real dedication to creating an immersive experience.
The final moments of the show involve a reveal that, if you let it, could reshape the outlines of the mystery that has unfolded over the past 80 minutes. It can leave you surprised and intrigued. The moments immediately after the show, however, were confusing, as our host never took a bow, and the audience sat for a few minutes and then finally decided to get up and leave. (That mystery was less satisfying.)
Séance: The Board Awakens is a collaboration between performer Rob Zabrecky and director Chad Rabinovitz. In the director’s note, Rabinovitz writes that “The illusions aren’t presented as tricks or feats—they’re woven directly into the storytelling, emerging naturally from the world of the play.”
Seamlessly weaving a magic act into a paranormal narrativeturns out to be a tricky feat all its own.At times, the scaffolding of the story buckled under the weight of tricks that felt forced and out of place, but everything held together during moments when the illusions were so complete they felt truly magical.
But, while the ingredients didn’t fully blend into a potion, the human desire for contact with the dead came through in the historical storytelling, and the illusions, when they managed to take off, were delightful.
Constellation’s Séance: The Board Awakens runs through Sunday, February 15th at the Waldron Arts Center in Bloomington.
