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The Tufts Daily
Where you read it first | Tuesday, December 3, 2024

‘Mindplay’ is a mixed bag of mentalism

Vinny DePonto’s interactive one-man show at the Huntington explores the memories that make us who we are.

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Vinny DePonto is pictured interacting with an audience member during a performance of "Mindplay."

Note: Nate and Odessa have been writing theater reviews together for four semesters. This is their 16th co-written article. For the first time ever, their opinions on this production were so different that they decided to split this article up into two separate reviews.

One of the final productions for the Huntington Theatre’s 2024 lineup, “Mindplay,” is a one-man show featuring mentalist Vinny DePonto. DePonto, whose performances employ "psychological tricks, visual art, and immersive storytelling," made his off-Broadway debut with “Charlatan” in 2014, and will return to the off-Broadway stage with “Mindplay” in early 2025 amid a surge of interest in mentalists and illusionists onstage. The show’s Boston run opened at the Calderwood Pavilion on Nov. 13 and closed on Sunday.

Odessa’s review:

“Mindplay” breaks free from the simple story structure of conventional plays. While the play follows DePonto’s journey through mentalism and life, it also includes several moments from the lives of the audience members. From their loved ones to their biggest fears, “Mindplay” is a battle within itself, focused on how much we wish to remember the good while being forced to grapple with the bad.  

At the top of the show, the audience is seemingly also presented with the question: Are we the parasite of our own lives? DePonto tells the story of a small, single-celled organism that buries its way into a mouse’s brain before controlling the mouse to make contact with a cat. The parasite then moves into the cat, living out the rest of its life in its new host.

This parasite is a perfect depiction of how anxiety can take over one’s mind, like an out-of-control train that makes your mind no longer your own. DePonto even tells the audience at the top of the show that he fears not being able to control his thoughts one day, fearing that eventually, the parasite will take over and win.

Throughout the show, DePonto strives to put his best foot forward as he dives into the minds of the audience. However, soon his own mind begins to scream too loud, shifting the show from a positive exploration to the past of the audience to a more dramatic, anxious delve into DePonto. The stage begins to flash, the lockers opening at random as DePonto runs around, attempting to put things back in their place and calm down the audience.

However, the more DePonto attempts to fix the mishaps and mistakes occurring on stage, the more things start to go wrong. At one point, DePonto turns to the audience, promising to fix it as he falls into an anxiety attack. It’s at this moment when the parasite seems to win, DePonto’s mind no longer being its own.

Then, DePonto makes a comeback. Throughout the show, the mentalist made sure to explain some basic neuroscience concepts to the audience, such as how the amygdala can enhance memory encoding. By the end, DePonto reiterates some of these basic brain functions as he puts the stage back together. He even takes a moment to show the audience how he can reset his own brain — by stopping his own pulse.

After this brain reset, DePonto seemingly continues on as normal. But a second glance at this story structure helps to define what “normal” even is. It is a mix of the positive and negative, the past fears and future desires and the impact we leave on each other. At times, the emotions that arise from the memories of our loved ones’ voices and the simple sounds of the ice cream truck can be overwhelming, but they show that we lived a life. At times, we have to take a step away from ourselves and reset so we can continue on. At times, we feel like the parasite, but we are always the host.

Nate’s review:

At the beginning of “Mindplay,” DePonto asks the audience: “What’s on your mind?” This seemingly simple question is the driving force behind the rest of the show. Upon entering the theater, each audience member was prompted to write their name on a card, along with a word that represented something they were thinking about. DePonto utilized these cards throughout the performance to interact with audience members and attempt to discover what was going on inside their heads. Unfortunately, DePonto’s mentalist gimmicks failed to hold up to scrutiny, and at times it even felt like he lost control of his own show.

DePonto is a gifted storyteller, and he frequently used stories to connect his own memories to the narrative of the show. Some of the show’s best moments were DePonto’s retellings of moments from his childhood, growing up as a young aspiring magician in New York. “Mindplay” explores the malleability of memory and the power of our memories to control the decisions we make. DePonto warned audiences to leave the theater if they were afraid of mind control — because there’s certainly no mind control in the real world, he said in a tongue-in-cheek reference to the persuasive power of social media.

However, these moments were few and far between, as most of the show was structured around audience participation. With any show that gets the audience involved, there is a degree of uncertainty inherent in the production; will people react as intended, and if they don’t, will the performer be able to keep the show on track? Some of these interactions were genuinely impressive: In one-on-one sit-downs with audience members, DePonto appeared to read people’s minds, bringing some of their most impactful memories to the forefront. In another moment, DePonto employed the “memory palace” technique to recite a randomly selected passage from “The Complete Works of William Shakespeare.”

But in many other moments, his interactions with audience members added nothing substantial to the narrative and often sapped the momentum of the show. Audience members misunderstood DePonto’s instructions, or didn’t speak up at all when their names were called, adding to the confusion of the show by making short sequences feel long and disjointed. DePonto’s exploration of his own anxiety is one of the show’s core themes, but his anxiety manifested itself as uncertainty onstage, making it unclear whether each slip-up was a scripted gag or a genuine mistake. “Mindplay” is never able to fully tie together the narrative threads it establishes throughout its 90-minute run time, and its anticlimactic ending leaves audience members unsatisfied. I have doubts about DePonto’s ability to bring “Mindplay” to New York next year, but if he’s truly a mind reader, he already knows that.

Summary Odessa: A fascinating delve into the mind and memory, “Mindplay” plays with complex ideas on the past and the self (4 stars). | Nate: Over-reliant on audience participation. “Mindplay” fails to balance its ambitious narrative goals with an uneven performance (2 stars).
3 Stars