Onstage at the Greenwich House Theater, Vinny DePonto sits across from an audience member. Her hands rest in his. The two are speaking casually, as if they weren’t in front of a packed house. They move circuitously through a range of topics until suddenly, confidently, DePonto says, “Tell me about the snorkel.” The audience member gasps. “Snorkel” was indeed the word she’d been thinking of, the word she’d written down upon entering the theater and tossed in the bowl with the rest of the audience.
DePonto’s Off-Broadway show “Mindplay” is full of moments like this. The show orbits around a fishbowl of memories, one for every member of its audience. Though the bowl is transparent, and though it is displayed prominently at stage right, it feels as if the memories instead flit about the room like invisible moths, so cleanly does DePonto pluck them out of thin air. Masterful acts of mindreading, telepathy, and memorization come one after another as DePonto pulls truths from his sleeves like silks, and participant after participant gasps, giggles, and nods their head yes. Yes, they all admit, that’s what I was thinking.
But the show’s primary conceit does not lie in these delightful moments of revelation. Much like Derek DelGaudio, whose 2020 show “In & Of Itself” made waves for pushing against the traditional constraints of the genre and attending theatrically to questions of identity, DePonto is out for far more than tricks. Both DelGaudio and DePonto are part of a wave of contemporary magicians trailblazing a new form—one that blends the best of magic and theater to produce something greater than the sum of its parts.
Though an expert trickster in his own right, DePonto’s most impressive gift may be for storytelling. The uninitiated, who associate stage magicians with simple acts of deceit, will experience, with “Mindplay,” a refreshing foil to their expectations. The magic at work in DePonto’s show is a distinctly human one—it identifies with its audience rather than alienating it. “We make art to connect. At least I do,” he explains. This earnest pursuit is the beating heart of “Mindplay,” which runs through May 11 at the Greenwich House Theater in Greenwich Village.
Through moments of profound vulnerability, where DePonto lets us behind the curtain, sharing pieces of his own history and enacting instances of intense self-doubt, “Mindplay” tells a deeply personal story about anxiety, loss, and grief. We hear from DePonto’s inner voice, see images from his past, and hear recordings of old memories he’d rather forget. DePonto’s moments of self-revelation, which stitch together a touching narrative about love and loss, serve a dual purpose. They demonstrate the delicate balance between controlling the mind and having the mind control you, while establishing an atmosphere of mutual vulnerability that encourages DePonto’s audience to play along when it’s their turn to share. Look, he demonstrates, I’ll do it too.
Because “Mindplay” is a show about memory, it is fitting that it smacks of nostalgia. Memories are like cassette tapes, goes one of DePonto’s analogies. The more they’re played—the more they are rewound and played again—the more distorted they become. His other props include a rotary phone, a slide projector, and a variety of outmoded recording devices. These analog relics are more than aesthetic flourishes—they imply something about the disposable nature of our cultural memory. How quickly we forget, they seem to say.
DePonto, who lives in Lagrangeville, has been working toward “Mindplay” for a long time. In 2016, touring a show called “Mind Reader” around New York City, he connected with the producer Eva Price, a friend of a friend, who came to see him perform. “I kind of begged her to take a call with me,” DePonto explains, laughing. On that call, they discussed collaborating on a more narrative-driven work. He wanted a real set, larger production elements—more than could fit in the suitcase he’d been dragging around the city. Price was interested, and the two began their work together.
That work became “Mindplay,” co-written by DePonto and Josh Koenigsberg and directed by Andrew Neisler. It was picked up for a run at the Geffen Theater in Los Angeles, set to open in March of 2020. “Then, of course,” DePonto explains, “some shit happened.” But the show was kept on the docket through the pandemic and was part of the Geffen’s first live season back in 2022. After LA, the show traveled to Washington, DC and Boston before landing in New York.
Of course, the true origins of “Mindplay” can be found further back. DePonto was first introduced to magic by his father, who gifted him assorted antique tricks from his own childhood. DePonto’s initial interest quickly snowballed into a passion, stoked by encouragement from his family. As a precocious kid hoping to pay for his expensive hobby, he began self-promoting with homemade posters and started booking gigs wherever he could. He performed his first professional show when he was 11 years old at Scappy’s Bowling Alley in Dobbs Ferry. At that age, “making 50 bucks a show was awesome,” he recounts. DePonto continued to book shows as he grew older, building a loyal customer base, which ultimately helped him put himself through school at Manhattanville University.
At Manhattanville, DePonto double-majored in psychology and theater. He was part of a company that practiced Playback Theatre, a form of improvisation where actors perform personal stories shared by audience members. Inspired in part by this experience, DePonto found himself drawn increasingly toward mentalism, a genre of magic that relies heavily on audience participation. “To me,” he explains, “it was performing with them instead of at them.”
This distinction is a key element of “Mindplay.” At no point is the audience safe from being called up on stage. There, they help to showcase DePonto’s deep arsenal of mental tricks. The highly participatory nature of the show lends each iteration an essential ephemerality. “There are certain production points and story points that we design to hit,” DePonto explains, “but anything can happen.”
DePonto admits that not every show goes perfectly. Not every audience member reacts to every trick in the same way. But this variability is part of what creates the magic of the show: authentic, spontaneous connections with real people. These connections are central to DePonto’s larger hopes. Speaking of his audience, he says: “If they walk away from it looking at their thoughts a little bit closer, or if they connect with each other through it, then I think I’ve succeeded.”
Admittedly, there are moments where “Mindplay” skids dangerously close to the precipice of sentimentality, but they are ultimately few. DePonto is a good driver, keeping all four wheels on the ground as he dodges opportunities for easy laughs, cheap tears, and empty gasps. The show is not merely a treat for those craving 90 minutes of shock and awe; it is a serious work of theater that blends traditional techniques of mentalism and illusion with the human magic of storytelling to produce a singular experience. If the success of shows like “Mindplay” foretells a larger evolution within the magic genre, then we are in luck.
This article appears in March 2025.
