Tricky Ricky

By JAY COCKS

The eight of clubs, which had gone missing, had no business turning up where it did. No way. Except Ricky Jay's way.

It happened last week, midway through the performance of Ricky Jay & His 52 Assistants, a dextrous, funny and entirely elegant revue of card conjuring at an off-Broadway theater in Manhattan. The missing card, boldly marked and closely watched, appeared -- after several comic digressions -- in a totally unexpected place that only a master manipulator can navigate (and that would be wrong to divulge here).

The audience, thoroughly flummoxed, responded with prolonged applause. As the full-bearded, heavyset Ricky Jay stepped forward to take a bow, a voice shouted from the fourth row, "How did you do that?" "I wasn't aware," replied the conjurer, allowing himself a small smile, "that we'd come to the question-and-answer portion of the show."

But there is an even more pertinent question: How can one man with a deck of cards create an evening of theater brimming with such unflagging surprise? "The trend toward overelaborate theater led me to this," he explains. "The kind of thing where people think more about helicopters than actors. The idea of walking onstage with a deck of cards and entertaining for an evening seemed a lovely way to go against the trend."

This does not speak, however, to the unforced skill with which the star manipulates his 52 assistants. A masterly marksman, he can scale an ordinary playing card across the stage with such force that it pierces a watermelon, and can rocket a card to decapitate a plastic duck. He can make a card rise from the deck as if by levitation, or tear one up and make it reappear whole. In Jay's supple hands, what is commonly known as a card trick is something approaching art. To watch him work a deck is to see him write haiku in the air, four times a week and three times on weekends.

For anyone whose notions of magic are bounded on the one side by the rattle and roll of Penn & Teller and, on the other, by the glitzoramas of David Copperfield, the Jay show will seem highly unconventional, perhaps even radical. "Other magicians are more prone to showing off, to letting us see how good they are," says Jules Fisher, who did the lighting for the show and who studies magic with Jay. "But Ricky's virtuosity is hidden." The show's scale and intimacy hark back to the 19th century tradition of such masters as Robert Houdin (from whom Houdini extracted his own stage name), and, along with card manipulations and effortless demonstrations of false dealing and three-card monte technique, Jay delivers a limber-fingered course in magic history and gambling ploys.

As he shuffles, flicks and flips, he expounds fondly on the achievements of George Devol, a 19th century sharper and headbutter, and warmly evokes the memory of his two contemporary masters Dai Vernon and Charlie Miller, both now deceased, who shared their secrets with their gifted acolyte. Photos of Vernon and Miller can be seen on the bookcase of the fin-de-siecle gaming room that serves as the show's sole set, and a carte de visite featuring a picture of the 19th century illusionist Johann Nepomuk Hofzinser actually shows up in a prop for one of the show's loveliest effects.

In the offhand and somewhat bemused fashion of the waywardly curious and the deeply knowledgeable, Jay also quotes Thorstein Veblen and Francois Villon during the show, and belts out a snatch of Neil Sedaka. He is not, altogether, your average Siegfried-and-Roy production. He dotes on well-turned literary phrases as well as street-tempered slang with a scholar's appreciation and a showman's panache. Language is one of the secret weapons of this show, which, given the fact that it was staged by Jay's friend, playwright David Mamet, is not surprising. "I'm not a magician; I know nothing about magic," Mamet insists. "The show's all Ricky. He's the ultimate repository of arcane information. I don't even know how he does these things. Whenever there was a question of something with a trick when we were rehearsing, Ricky just went into deep magic conferences with his myrmidons."

The theater advises that the show may not be appropriate for anyone under 17. This has nothing to do with content. Jay insists on the seriousness of his craft. "Magic," he says, "has been thrown away as just something for kids. If the curtains opened and there were 20 kids in the audience, I couldn't do the show." Michael Weber, Jay's business partner, suggests that "Ricky's trying to redress the focus of magic."

He has, in fact, been doing that ever since he was a kid himself. "Ricky's repertoire goes on forever," Mamet says. "He's been working on it for 40 years." Jay was born in Brooklyn and raised in New Jersey (he slips away from chronological specifics -- "Just say I'm in my 40s"), and can recall performing sleight-of-hand tricks at a backyard barbecue for the Society of American Magicians when he was four years old. Vernon was in the audience. "The Professor," he remembers, "was too kind to give me the devastating critique I deserved."

Jay kept working on his technique until he was good enough to appear on local television at the age of 7. After drifting through a number of jobs and a handful of colleges, he found his way, in the '70s, to Los Angeles, where he apprenticed with Miller and Vernon, and played gigs wherever he could find them, including opening for acts as various as Anita O'Day and Cheech and Chong. Betweentimes, he began studying and writing about the history of conjuring. His first book was Cards as Weapons (1977), an amusing discourse illustrating the various ways that an ordinary playing card -- or a whole deck -- can deliver awful injury to an attacker. His next, Learned Pigs & Fireproof Women (1986), was a history and tribute to "unique, eccentric and amazing entertainers," among them, "the Great Peters," a bungee-style leaper who dove off a 75-ft.-high rigging with a rope fixed to an elastic collar around his neck.

Now regarded as a true authority on the conjuring arts, Jay has elevated his status with a new publication, Jay's Journal of Anomalies, a quarterly dedicated to the lives and achievements of the sort of historic characters who populated Learned Pigs. "There's nothing like the feeling of seeing the Journal come off the press," says the bibliomanic Jay, who has amassed a library of 4,000 to 5,000 books, "except being onstage."

Being onstage is Jay's lifeline to the past and his throughline to the future. For the audience, it is a paradigm of dazzlement. If wonder is truly the beginning of wisdom, then Ricky Jay & His 52 Assistants is the smartest show in town.