Supernatural? Magician Has Doubts
Neil GenzlingerMarch 6, 2014: Harry Houdini was apparently a complex fellow, and the Axis Theater Company gives him a complex treatment in "Nothing on Earth Can Hold Houdini", by Randy Sharp. Like Ms. Sharp’s look at the Dust Bowl, "Last Man Club", produced by the company in 2012, it is a play that bracingly refuses to be a straightforward historical treatment. We get to see one of Houdini’s famous escape routines, but the play isn’t about his skills as a magician. The focus is his crusade to debunk mediums, a cause Houdini took up in the later years of his life. (He died in 1926 at 52.) He became well known for exposing the tricks used by spiritualists at séances and such, and he was a judge for a prize offered by Scientific American to anyone who could demonstrate undeniable psychic abilities.
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