It’s all hands on deck at the outset of The Unfair Advantage, as Australian sleight-of-hand master Harry Milas invites members of the small audience at Steppenwolf’s Merle Reskin Garage Space to complete a “wash” shuffle in which a deck of cards is spread out face down on the felt-covered tabletop and mixed up randomly.
Casinos employ this shuffle in their poker rooms because it cannot be used to stack the deck. So, of course, Milas somehow manages to pluck all four aces out of the facedown pile of audience-washed pasteboards. He shares the secret to the trick at the end of the briskly paced one-hour show, but I can’t tell you what it is.
That’s because audience members are required to sign a nondisclosure agreement before entering the theater. Is the secrecy contract a bit of ballyhoo? Sure. Because even though Milas explains how he pulls off each deck manipulation, learning how to actually execute even one of them proficiently ourselves would take years of dedicated practice.
Even when you know exactly what’s coming, Milas fools your eye into thinking he’s done nothing but complete an honest shuffle or deal when in fact he has stacked the deck to sequence the cards just so or has dealt the cards he desires from the middle or bottom of the pile. It’s extraordinary enough to draw repeated gasps and exclamations from captivated onlookers.
He became obsessed with card manipulation when his mom gave him a book on the topic at the age of 10. The first half covered card cheating techniques and the second half detailed card magic tricks. He spent years mastering them and enjoyed a growing reputation for sleight-of-hand wizardry as a teen. A career was born. He did spend time working casino security, but found it depressing, so performing became the sole outlet for his prodigious talents.
Milas clearly takes great pleasure in astounding an audience, but he’s the opposite of pretentious. His patter is friendly, warm and engaging, and he invites questions both during and after the proceedings.
He says the difference between card cheating and card magic is that one aims to keep secrets from us and one to keep secrets for us. It’s a lovely way to sum up the feeling of wanting to know how a trick is performed while realizing it’s more fun to believe in the magic of it.
That’s why Milas includes one sequence of coin magic in the show and keeps the secrets of those tricks for us. If he told us how he made the coins move from palm to palm of audience members, he notes, the explanation would be so prosaic and boring as to ruin all the fun.
During the audience conversation at the late show Friday night, Milas shared his deep appreciation of Chicago’s culture of close-up magic, which made bringing the U.S. premiere of his show to the city a no-brainer. He revered the late Ricky Jay, who had a long, fruitful creative partnership with David Mamet. In fact, two lines in The Unfair Advantage pay homage to Jay and his Mamet-directed show Ricky Jay and His 52 Assistants, which enjoyed a legendary run at Steppenwolf in 1995.
But this is a different kind of show, providing a compelling glimpse into the world of cardsharps that remains relevant today. Milas noted that a particular deck-stacking technique was a popular cheating method in the Old West, but it has recently made a comeback in Australia and Southeast Asia. Everything old is new again. (Why hasn’t this cheating method popped back up in the States? Because it’s defeated by the act of cutting the cards, which is required at U.S. casinos.)
It’s not just practice that makes perfect here. Milas has developed an extraordinary memory that enables him to keep track of every card in a shuffled deck after he examines the sequence of cards for less than a minute. This leads into an array of mind-bending manipulations.
But the practice is what enables Milas to deceive our eyes so masterfully with his sleight-of-hand. He stakes his claim to being one of the world’s top card manipulators by demonstrating a deal he assures the audience they will not see anywhere else, a “stud” variation of a second deal, which means he’s not only dealing the second card from the deck while making it seem like it’s the top card–hard enough–but he’s doing it with a stud poker deal that requires him to flip the card face up as he tosses it onto the table, overcoming the resistance of the top card while leaving us none the wiser.
It’s extraordinary to see. Or rather to not see, even though we know it’s happening. Somehow.
The Unfair Advantage runs through May 19 at Steppenwolf Theatre’s Merle Reskin Garage Space.
For a full roundup of reviews of this show, visit Theatre in Chicago.
