IMAGO
Imago is just as magical. The four members of the company use masks and costumes to create illusions. Caterpillars, frogs, geckos, and nameless orbs inhabit the stage. Though Disney-style cuteness threatens at times, the company has such strong technical foundations that it creates real magic. As the grandfatherly man next to me said, it was “Pilobolus meets Mummenschanz meets Clown College.”
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This man was a professor emeritus of theater at Northwestern University, Bob Schneiderman, who knows all about illusion and magic. The ten- year-old girl was the granddaughter of a colleague. Her aplomb while watching the tricks was the natural reaction of a child raised in the theater. Good magic is grounded in skill and experience.
The cleverest mask, for Cowboy, is a square box with the cartoon face of a cowpoke painted on it. The face is on a scroll, and when the performer turns a crank on the side of the box, the cowboy’s face scrolls out of view and is replaced by a winding road. The scroll winds down to tell the whole story, which includes a thunderstorm, a mirage in the desert, and drinking in a saloon. (The scroll is by George Smith, the cartoonist who draws The Smith Family.) A postmodern deconstructivist literary critic would have appreciated the concept that the mask was the story.
Note the many children’s toys and images throughout the evening: a Slinky, blocks, a Disney-like caterpillar, Frankenstein. These icons almost define an American child’s life. For illusion to be successful, the audience must be willing to become children again–to be ten years old, when you know that pennies don’t change magically into quarters but some grandfatherly figure keeps doing it anyway.
