Louise Casemore in Lucky Charm, Defiance Theatre at Found Festival 2025. Photo by Brianne Jang
By Liz Nicholls, .ca
I’m coming very late to this (a week away in the east is to blame, more about this later). But I went a séance Friday night.
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It was in an unexpected place, a bungalow on a placid neighbourhood street. Life lesson #14 (also applicable to art and in particular the Found Festival): you never can tell. The séance happened downstairs, in a dim, atmospherically cluttered chamber — with trimmings: red velvet drapery, incense, tiny glowing Tiffany-style lamps, a gramophone, all manner of memorabilia … gilt-framed photos, old cigar boxes, tea trays, books. Ah, and a table.
That’s where a New York showgirl in a beautiful frock stepped out of the 1920s (in high heels), to have a go at summoning the spirit of her late husband. That the dearly departed, gone these 10 years, was the most famous magician and escape artiste in the world, Harry Houdini, was one surprise. And so was the widow’s tone: jaded, skeptical, worldly amusement. That’s how we met Bess, Mrs. Houdini, the presiding muse of Louise Casemore’s Lucky Chance.
Louise Casemore in Lucky Charm, Defiance Theatre at Found Festival 2025. Photo supplied
Without fail for the last decade, in accordance with her late husband’s express instructions — a chain as formidable as the kind from which Harry regularly escaped — Mrs. Houdini has invited people into her home weekly, with a purpose. For 520 Sundays in a row she has attempted to connect with her late husband, looking for the code he proposed embedding in a deck of cards. And it hasn’t happened. By now, Sunday number 521, she’s entitled to her doubts about the whole enterprise, which includes the razzmatazz hucksterism of her barker assistant (Jake Tkaczyk). And she congratulates us for our sense of possibility over plausibility.
That skepticism about spiritualist conjurers, and claims of lifting the veil between the living and the world of the dead, are part of the story, and the dramatic tension, in Casemore’s fascinating and intricate play. The Houdini’s were famous spiritualist de-bunkers, and Harry’s agenda in the weekly séances is to explode the fraudulence for once and for all. The irony that glints off Lucky Charm at strange angles is that the widow of the star escape virtuoso is herself his prisoner, enchained from beyond the grave, sealed off from the world — by loyalty, by a sense of loss, by grief. Ah, and by memory.
I don’t want to spoil the surprises and unexpected puzzles of Casemore’s intriguing play, directed by Max Rubin of Theatre Yes and designed by Even Gilchrist. But Bess Houdini does conjuring of her own, by her interactions with the audience and by the memorabilia she collects, both from us and in the room. The storytelling of Lucky Charm is highly original, both in the story itself — which conjures an alluring lost Jazz Age world of entertainment (did you know Houdini made an elephant disappear?) — and in the way a remarkable story gets told, with the audience.
This is theatre up close, eyeball to eyeball (six of the audience of 15 are at the table, surrounded by the rest of us). And Casemore, as you know if you’ve seen OCD and GEMINI, is such a vivid, expressive, attentive performer.
Strange and eerie things happen; this is a production with both a magic consultant (Ron Pearson) and a special effects consultant (Ian Walker). There’s a sense, to be sure, in which all live theatre is a conjuring of spirits, both living and dead. But Lucky Chance, irony-infused, is something special. It’s actually about the conjuring (with an alluring story to tell about a legendary escape and illusion artist and the behind-the-scenes assistant to whom he was married). And we the audience share some magic of our own; our memories are the key that unlocks her story. Are we Bess’s lucky charm? More than that I shouldn’t say, but it’s an easeful interaction that counts, theatrically and narratively.
The Common Ground Arts Society/ Theatre Yes production, developed during the playwright/star’s two-year Fresh AiR Residency at Found Fest, sold out its entire run in advance. Lucky Chance is now in its last weekend live (and unless you do have a lucky charm or connections beyond the grave, you should consider the streaming option of this very cool show July 23 through 27). Details at commongroundarts.ca.
