Everyone knows these mountains are magic. A thousand local references to Rip Van Winkle can’t be wrong, after all.
But metaphors aside, magic is real on Main Street in the snow-kissed ski town of Windham, where an address in hand and a knock on a stranger’s door can show you the real thing: cards disappearing, ropes defying physics, the very nature of a room shifting before your eyes. If you haven’t seen that yet, you probably haven’t met Windham’s Sean Doolan. Once he lets someone pick a card (any card), they’re often irresistibly drawn to his Magic on Main show—staged in the library of his home—to be amazed, and maybe even to amaze themselves.
Doolan’s intimate show is a blend of classic parlor magic, Catskills humor and something closer to a courtroom lesson in perception. It’s become an unlikely niche and winter-afternoon draw in Windham: a house-concert-style performance in which the audience doesn’t just watch tricks, but gets recruited into them. The point, Doolan said, isn’t only to entertain. It’s to leave people with a challenge: pay attention, question what you think you saw, and consider what a “second act” might look like.
“Before the first show I ever did at the house,” Doolan recounts with a laugh, “I pulled the curtain back and peeked out the window. I saw the audience coming and let the curtain fall to hide me again. Well, they all saw that and kept walking! I had to go outside and chase them down.” This was almost five years ago, when his parlor entertainment revival was just getting started—and before the five-star reviews began to fall like scarves from a magician’s cuff.
The audience last week was a calm and willing group of three. Doolan performs for no less than two, though he prefers a group slightly larger for the show. For Doolan, who is often assisted at the top of the show by his wife Christine, a highly accomplished balloon artist in her own right, one of the chief aims of doing his show, aside from providing amusement, is “to inspire people to pursue their passion, and to show them that at any age, they can have a second act in life.”
That’s because Doolan has lived that arc himself, starting his career not as a jovial upstate entertainer, but as a trial lawyer in The Bronx where he grew up. An illness at age 47—Doolan is now 60—led to what he called a “mid-life refocus,” and a stint at the Jeff McBride School of Magic in Las Vegas.
His favorite number mimics the contents of a jury box. “I’d spent a lifetime in the courtroom trying to convince twelve people to find in favor of my client, and I realized that is my perfect audience,” he said.
Parlor magic—magic done for a group larger than one-on-one but smaller than a stage show—isn’t new. Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin, widely considered the father of modern magic, wrote about it in his 1877 book, “Secrets of Conjuring and Magic, or How to Become a Wizard.” Doolan cited the in-home shows of the 19th-century Austrian magician Johann Nepomuk Hofzinser as an influence. And the habit of hosting performances mixed with philosophical discussion in one’s living room was a tried-and-true diversion that wealthy Italian and French women codified into what came to be called, to this day, a salon. Thought-provoking discussion was often the point, much as it is in Doolan’s show.
A classic Catskills comedy-circuit brand of humor pervades the performance—there’s a bit about a tie, a poem straight out of a Marx Brothers film—but the second half increasingly delves into the psychology of the audience. Doolan approaches that not only through the lens of the trickster embodied by a magician, but also through the brain puzzles and traps of a skilled trial lawyer. Subtly, as if building a case over the course of an hour, disappearing coins yield to examinations of perception that reflect back on the audience itself. And one begins to notice, almost as if by sleight of hand, that law books remain on the shelves of this library in something like equal measure to the books on prestidigitation.
“My number one takeaway from law school is having developed those critical thinking skills,” Doolan said. “So what I want to encourage people to do is to think critically, which is one of the hardest things to do.”
It’s a real treat to become part of the tricks at Magic on Main—and a showman’s feat to make self-examination, and even cross-examination, feel like a treat.
Alex Scott is a contributing writer. Send correspondence to reporting@theoverlooknews.com.