Mindplay is not really a play, so let’s get that straight from the beginning. There were many times as I was sitting in the sparsely populated Calderwood Pavilion theater when I thought, “I am not getting any insight from this, these are just magic tricks.” They were absolutely impressive magic tricks! But magic tricks nonetheless.
Vinny DePonto, the “mentalist” behind Mindplay, aims with the 90 minute interactive show to make the audience think about how the brain works both by picking their brains and disclosing about his own. Before entering, each audience member is given a prompt about memory on a small piece of paper — mine asked for an “embarrassing memory,” and others seemed to ask for memories about love or fear. They must write down a few words around that memory before sealing the slip of paper in an envelope, writing their name and seat number on the envelope, and putting it in a box next to the stage. Latecomers had to go on stage and put their envelopes directly into the fishbowl from which DePonto would pull throughout the night. In between correctly guessing things people had written on their slips of paper, he would describe his own experience with his grandparents losing their memories and how it inspired him to get better at controlling his own mind, panic attacks and all.
The “mind reading” portion of the show was extraordinarily strong. I respected that DePonto never claimed any connection with the supernatural, taking the humanist approach by saying everything he did was him planting ideas or reading a person’s natural reflexes. (If you count writing words down on a card as a natural reflex, then he’s right!) He said that you could discover nearly everything about a person by knowing “what they fear, what they love, and what they hide away,” which explains the prompts on the cards.
Only once did he get caught when an audience participant said he accidentally thought of a memory other than the one on his card, making the evidence of mind-reading a little weaker. I’d be interested to see the show again purely to ascertain whether he was simply reaping ideas or also sowing them, especially in the case of a certain comestible motif. So if you’re into “mentalists,” definitely check this out.
I was hoping for more of a holistic theatrical experience, which I didn't quite get. DePonto would say something about his own mind, give a neuroscientific reason for it, and then say he would demonstrate through an audience member. Rarely did the thing he demonstrated with the audience member actually apply to the thing he said before. Then he’d get “interrupted” by some element of his set, do the thing where an actor pretends to be trapped in the play he himself wrote, and go back to talking about himself. It turns out it’s pretty hard to suspend disbelief about that in a one-man show.
Despite DePonto’s tragically relatable story about his grandparents—nearly everyone has a similar experience—I did not feel any actual movement from the themes in the show. This can often be a problem with self-disclosing writing, but especially so when one must, rather than projecting a train of thought onto a page, portray it with their own body for 200-odd shows. We as the audience discover more about DePonto’s story as he tells it to us, but he does not discover more about himself, despite taking on the cadence of doing so. Deponto’s attempt to bring himself to the same introspective level as the audience instead just brings attention to the fact that he is on a stage and we, for the most part, are not. And the driving force behind this entire self-discovering genre, that the personal is political, simply cannot function in this almost totally apolitical show where the only mention of the outside world is the concept of “propaganda.”
DePonto makes others’ minds support the story of his own. But I think the show would have been much stronger if he structured it in the opposite sense. By far the most compelling part of the evening was others’ revealed thoughts and the resulting ethnography of a Tuesday night Boston theater crowd. It was a rather elderly, very New England group: one woman’s “mind palace” was her Cape House, another “mind palace” was a “family camp,” and one man’s happiest memory was sailing in Boston Harbor. A college student had his greatest fear revealed as “aging” while sharing the stage with two elderly people. And one elderly gay man was jokingly berated by DePonto for having “Hit Me Baby One More Time” by Britney Spears stuck in his head before he devastatingly revealed that the man hoped his friend with Alzheimer’s would remember to make it to his Friendsgiving dinner.
The strength of this show is not DePonto’s self-disclosure, which serves little purpose but to weakly attempt to remove him from the god-king status of a close-up magician. It is that the fear of DePonto’s ability to expose our innermost thoughts frees us to be candid with strangers in a way we rarely are.
You’re wondering what the “embarrassing memory” I had to write down was? If you must know, it was about an embarrassing school project where we made a parody of Hairspray’s“Welcome to the Sixties” about urbanization: “Welcome to the City.” We sang it in front of the class. We only discovered in the doing of it how poor the reception would be. It haunts me to this day.
See? Anyone can self-disclose!
2025