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Secret is an intoxicating dream, a riddle, a game that makes one feel as if he’s stepped through the looking glass and taken on a trip for a couple of hours through a dizzying hall of wonders. Funny, bewildering, almost frightening, and even sometimes poignant, Brown redesigns what one should expect from a magic show.
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You have probably never seen anything like Derren Brown. It’s so remarkable that you will think everyone in the audience is a plant, but I assure you, it’s all real. The UK’s most famous mentalist is going to blow your mind.
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“A wild-eyed, “how’d he do that” romp. Derren Brown is self-effacing and enthused with coal-shovels full of charm”
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At a cultural moment when the idea of “owning the narrative” has become the cliche du jour, he boldly posits that the stories we tell ourselves are precisely what limit our perceptions.
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If you like your brains scrambled, or over easy, or poached or any way other than the way you usually carry them around, Derren Brown is the fella for you. Brown is a living rubik’s cube. he is the pied piper of possibility. He takes the magic that is theatre and kicks it into the stratosphere while you are watching and pulls an entire zoo out of his hat. Go see this show.
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“We gave it an A. Brown dumbfounds with a stunning colonnade of tricks, physical and psychological, limned by the sensation of third-rail danger. A thoughtful, nimble script – Secret is real magic.”
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★★★★ Brown oozes confidence and charisma, you can’t turn away. Secret is enough to make even the most hardened skeptic think twice.
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“An astounding piece of psychological theater. Secret challenges audiences to look at the ways our personal mythology guides our lives. The first-act finale is as thrilling and mind-boggling as any of the great curtain-closers from the entire canon of American drama.”
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“Secret is way beyond the usual brand of magic”
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“★★★★ Boy, is he a mind reader. Brown sent people spilling back out into the lobby and on to the sidewalk and into the subway still quizzing each other. Secret is a salutary reminder that even in a disenchanted age, some mysteries remain”
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“An Upset,” a one-act play by David Auburn first seen in New York in 2008, is being revived around the city timed to the Open, including three shows at 99 Bowery beginning Sept. 12.
“It’s always hard to put a finger on why something is suddenly in the zeitgeist,” said Ruhl, a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist and a Tony Award nominee. “I don’t know why it is happening with tennis in theater right now. But for me, while researching the Bush dynasty, I realized tennis is such a big part of their lives and a wonderful metaphor for family competition and sibling rivalry.”
In “Scenes From Court Life,” Greg Keller plays George W. Bush as a more shrewd politician than his brother Jeb but an inferior tennis player.
“Athletes are almost another species to playwrights,” Keller said. “The writer’s world is so subjective, but for athletes there is always a winner and a loser.”
Tennis holds undeniable appeal for the theater. For starters, it can encompass widely different settings, including the Bush family compound, the public courts of the Lower East Side and Arthur Ashe Stadium.
Tennis, Keller said, is also “one-on-one, but you are not physically touching each other like in boxing.”
He added, “You are in your own little world.”
Bragen has written other works about tennis, including a monologue called “Game, Set, Match.” He said the sport offered intimacy and isolation — great fodder for writers.
“There’s a kind of dance that I feel as a player, but you are alone in your own head at the same time you are connected to other person,” Bragen said.
Ruhl said she liked the combat mixed with decorum, “the formality within the structure of competition.”
Ryan Sweeney, who played Division I tennis at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and is producing and starring in “An Upset,” said, “Tennis is a lonely sport, and Auburn’s script touches on the players’ vulnerabilities.”
