Play Dead Director Teller on the Supreme Beauty of Scaring Audiences to Death

About the author:
Best known as the smaller, silent half of stage duo Penn & Teller, Teller has been performing a unique blend of comedy and magic with partner Penn Jillette since 1975, but that’s not all. He has also penned a number of books and essays, is a frequent contributor to NPR’s All Things Considered and co-authored the Nature Reviews Neuroscience paper "Attention and awareness in stage magic: turning tricks into research." The Showtime series Penn & Teller: Bulls***!, dedicating to debunking everything from alien abductions to anger management, is currently in its eighth season. His latest project? Co-creating, with fellow veteran stage magician Todd Robbins, the darkly spooky and bizarrely funny off-Broadway show Play Dead, which he also directed—all while continuing his nightly show with Jillette in Las Vegas. Somewhere in there, he a moment to share with Broadway.com his fascination with life's dark humor, and why we’re never more alive than when we’re scared to death.

We’ve made Play Dead the kind of no-holds-barred, funny, lyrical Danse Macabre we’ve always wanted to see—a mystifying séance, a grand guignol, and a serious comic play, all built on the idea that the best way to rob Death of his power is to look him in the face, scream, and laugh.

Yes, what you may have heard is true: the audience screams a lot. They let loose. They have a blast. They clutch their dates in the dark. And they laugh. Long and hard. People leave the show hugging each other and grinning and exhilarated.

Todd Robbins and I have known each other since Penn and I played off-Broadway in 1985. Five years ago at the New York Fringe Festival, Todd did the first incarnation of Play Dead. He called it Dark Deceptions and asked the audience to pretend to be the congregation of a spiritualist church, while he played the minister/medium. It’s a fantastic idea for a show, but Todd wanted to develop it further, to take it out of the period and into the present.

Both Todd and I had studied the midnight spook shows that were hugely popular with teenagers from the 1930s to 1950s. These were magic shows full of thrills and scares, presented late at night in movie theaters after the films had ended. Todd and I wondered if we could create a new and original kind of “spook show” for sophisticated adults.

Our first step was rhetorical. We stopped talking about “ghosts” and “spirits” and used the raw phrase “the dead” (popularized by George Romero). Suddenly we were no longer in the realm of Casper the Friendly Ghost, but venturing into the nature of darkness and fear and discovering how close screaming is to laughter.

Utter darkness is a rich and resonant experience very rare in our modern world. If you put a group of people in the dark, and suggest that they become naughty, their inhibitions will dissolve. If you suggest that they will feel the icy kisses of the dead, they will feel them (particularly if you simultaneously shower the audience with frozen rose petals). Darkness is primal. We all begin life in the dark and end it there. We fear it. And that leads directly into our setting.

Unlike most plays, which happen “once upon a time,” Play Dead takes place here and now in the spooky old Players Theater, where Todd houses his collection of “souvenirs” of exceptionally amusing dead people.

To depict the supernatural, we invented 10 completely new pieces of magic, and three spectacular thrill-rides in the dark. There are glowing demon birds, naked human spirits walking among the audience, flying tables and tambourines. There’s a beautiful disembodied human hand; and a file box that contains pure evil.

Spinning a yarn about the pseudo-supernatural through the medium of magic is harder than it sounds. It took us three years, three workshops, and 66 drafts. What eventually provided the spine of the show was the true tale of how Todd (and by extension, all of us) learned the difference between death in fictional spooky stories and the kind that breaks our hearts. We hope we’ve come close to finding the right balance of honesty, mystery, beauty, humor, and crazy, wild fun.