I Want to Believe

The first magic show I ever attended was not at Caesars Palace or the Golden Nugget but rather, of all places, the National Arts Club. That’s where, in late September, Jeanette Andrews debuted The Mental Architecture of Magic, a performance-lecture that is doubly revealing about the efficacy and mechanics of deception. Andrews, a visiting artist at MIT, talks about magic as a genre of experience in which we permit ourselves “to experience perceptual failure.” The stakes for us viewers, she said, are low, but our level of scrutiny is high because we know we are about to be duped.

That checks out. Like any magician presumably worth their salt (as I’ve said, I’m new to this scene), Andrews is skilled at the act of transmutation: She made a ball “disappear,” only to make it “reappear”; she made that same ball “morph” into a crystal triangular prism; and she bent the erect stem of a wine glass into flaccid defeat. When she tossed a red apple above her head, it appeared to swap guises midair, descending back into her hand as a bright green Granny Smith. Her stage persona …