Ricky Jay doesn’t like to refer to the things he does as tricks. “I think of them,” he says, “as pieces.”
Pieces like the endless variations of “pick a card, any card” he can perform. Or his ability to pierce the skin of a watermelon with a deftly thrown ace of spades. And the way he can deal several hands of five-card stud, then tell everyone exactly what they’re holding.
Sleight-of-hand artist, jokester, chronicler of the demimonde of grifters, con men, circus freaks, vaudeville specialty acts and magicians-Ricky Jay is all these. In an era when high-tech illusionists with laser shows, spandexed female assistants and overblown productions rule the conjuring world, Jay has returned the magic to magic, showing how one highly trained, learned man can astound and amaze with only a deck of cards, a few little balls and some cups.
Playwright David Mamet, one of Jay’s most devoted fans, is directing him in “Ricky Jay and His 52 Assistants,” which is at the Second Stage Theatre for a sold-out eight-week run and then will almost certainly move to a larger venue. Mamet says the stoics “said a person is rich in terms of what they can do without. With Ricky, you take away everything but one deck of cards, and it’s a tour de force.”
Jay is a heavyset, fortysomething guy with a beard, machine-gun speaking style and gentle manner. He looks like a salesman at a shopping mall clothing store who somehow made it to the finals of the World Series of Poker. Onstage, Jay is low-key and enormously likable, an artist who loves to tell the story behind the trick (he recounts the history of three-card monte), and seems genuinely surprised when audiences applaud or gasp at his amazing stunts. This reaction may be because, as Jay said, “in the show, I’m trying to do the stuff that pleases me.”
Jay’s fascination with magic has led him in interesting directions. He wrote “Learned Pigs & Fireproof Women,” a book about “unique, eccentric and amazing entertainers,” and is putting together another book on a history of eccentric wagers. He also has just published the first issue of “Jay’s Journal of Anomalies,” a quarterly devoted to “the investigation of conjurers, cheats, hustlers, hoaxters, pranksters, jokesters, pretenders, impostors.” The first issue of “Anomalies” is about an early 19th Century dog act that stole shtick from another dog act.
“I literally am intrigued in terms of methodology and performance by the things that have entertained people,” he said. “And I find it funny. There will always be people who will write about Houdini, but fewer who write about the less well-known figures of that era.”
Jay once was the high poobah of all this history: As curator of the Los Angeles-based Mulholland Library of Conjuring and the Allied Arts, he presided over a 20,000-piece collection of books, manuscripts and handbills about magic and related fields. But the library was owned by a banker who went under during the 1980s savings-and-loan crisis; the Mulholland was sold at auction in 1991 to magician David Copperfield, who has warehoused it in Las Vegas.
Which leads to the revival of Jay’s performing career. “I no longer have the reasons to be in L.A. I once had,” he said, referring to the demise of the library and the recent deaths of two mentors. “It seemed like a good time to do this. In those years, I was doing more of the academic side and less performing. Something built up-performing is the first thing I ever did, my first love.”
Jay and Mamet first met about eight years ago, when the writer approached the magician after a performance. They quickly became friends. Mamet asked Jay to lecture before an acting class, then cast him in the movies “House of Games,” “Things Change” and “Homicide” (on the first, Jay also acted as a technical consultant, another of his sidelines). When Jay got the urge to return to the stage, he turned to Mamet.
Having developed “hundreds” of performance pieces, Jay needed to pick the ones he would take onstage. “I came to New York with a sheet of paper of what I thought would be the first act, and the second act,” Jay said. “David had some material he had seen me do that he really liked. But I put together what I thought made sense, based on performing situations.”
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The result is a seamless compendium of tricks, lore, poetry and personality. Sort of Ricky Jay’s Greatest Hits.