Invisible Tango

Reviewed by Stephen Fife
Geffen Playhouse
Extended through July 21 

RECOMMENDED

I’ve been to many shows at the Audrey Skirball Kenis Theater — certainly over 50 — but I’ve never seen an audience there as excited as at Invisible Tango, Helder Guimarães’s magical show about the practice of magic and the mysteries of the universe. I attended the Saturday matinee, where audiences are usually on the older and rather sedentary side. The audience here was made up of mostly older people, but there was nothing sedentary about them. There was a palpable tension in the room — an almost giddy expectation — that took me completely by surprise. They were more like kids at the circus than grown folk at the Geffen.

It might have had something to do with Guimarães’s previous residency at the Geffen in 2013 with Nothing to Hide (performed with fellow illusionist Derek DelGaudio and directed by Neil Patrick Harris), or his sold-out run of Borrowed Time at various secret locations around L.A. in 2016. It could even have been the mystique conferred on him by his having been the sleight-of-hand instructor for Sandra Bullock and Cate Blanchett on the film Oceans 8. Or maybe it was just the ageless anticipation that goes along with being at a sold-out magic show.

I have to admit that I had somehow missed out on Mr. Guimarães’s prior shows and on news of his fame. This was my first encounter with his work, and I was full of skepticism about whether this would be worth my time. I tend to avoid magic shows, since I am easily fooled and am usually left with a grudging admiration for the practitioner’s craft, accompanied by an empty feeling and a yearning for narrative substance or just something from the experience that didn’t evaporate into thin air (like another illusion).

But this is no mere magic show — and let me say right up front that Mr. Guimarães is more a metaphysical wizard and cosmic philosopher than a magician. Yes, there are card tricks, and they are brilliant, confounding. The show is truly interactive, with a great deal of audience participation, which feeds on the eager anticipation that was there at the outset, morphing it into a childish glee. But that is only one level of a deceptively subtle and complex show.

Invisible Tango has been directed by Frank Marshall (famed producer of the Indiana Jones and Back to the Future movies, among many others), with music by Moby, scene design by Francois-Pierre Couture, lighting design by Elizabeth Harper, sound design by Alex Hawthorn and dramaturgy by Amy Levinson. I found the production impeccable and precise in all regards, exemplary in the way it used all the elements to create a piece that consistently underplays its winning hand and is all the more powerful for it.

This starts with Guimarães’s stage persona. A slight man with thinning hair, he wears a buttoned vest over a polka-dot shirt, blue jeans and sneakers. He looks like a grad school teacher, beloved for his nerdiness. Portuguese-born, Guimarães has an accent that adds to the sense of his being a visiting professor holding a seminar.

And, my God, does he have something to teach! Guimarães has two narrative threads running through his show. One has to do with his first car accident, which occurred when a woman opened her car door on a narrow street just as he was driving by. The second has to do with a mysterious notebook about magic that he acquired from a Buenos Aires antiques shop. These two threads are united by Guimarães’s stories about an elderly next-door neighbor who had been a famous circus clown. I don’t want to give away too much information, but, as someone who has written fiction myself, I was in awe of Guimarães’s narrative voice, and the easygoing way he introduces and develops ruminations on large questions such as “Does everything really happen for a reason?”

I take serious issue with critics who have tried to reduce Invisible Tango to a very good magic show, and who are embarrassingly amiss when they claim that Guimarães never completes his thread about things happening for a reason. Invisible Tango has all the subtlety and beauty of a novella by that Argentinian word-magician, Jorge Luis Borges. As with Borges’s best stories — and unlike almost every other magic show I have seen — this theater event will stay with me for a very long time. My congratulations to Guimarães and to those who have collaborated with him to create this lovely and entertaining meditation on the enigma of human existence.

Geffen Playhouse, 10886 Le Conte Ave.; Tues.-Sat., 8 p.m. (dark Thurs., 7/4); Sat., 3 p.m.; Sun., 2 p.m. & 7 p.m., extended through Jul. 21. (310) 208-2028 or www.geffenplayhouse.org. Running time: 80 minutes with no intermission.