David Kwong is a crossword constructor for The New York Times and a full-time magician.The Enigmatist/Supplied
There is no magic in magic tricks. That’s one of the first things David Kwong – whose show The Enigmatist runs at Toronto’s Lighthouse Blackbox Theatre through June 22 – says when he takes the stage for two mind-bending hours.
Kwong isn’t just a masterly magician. He’s also a crossword constructor for The New York Times whose grids could foil even the most adept cruciverbalists. The Enigmatist brilliantly melds his sleight-of-hand skills with his passion for puzzles, making it part traditional magic show, part escape room, with the audience working to solve a series of clues throughout that will unlock a mystery box at the end.
Since 2019, Kwong has performed the show in New York, Los Angeles (where he lives with his wife and young child), Chicago and at the Kennedy Center in Washington. But this Toronto run is a bit of a homecoming – his dad moved from Hong Kong to attend McMaster University in the mid-1960s and spent several years in Toronto before decamping across the lake to Rochester.
Kwong’s original idea was that audience members couldn’t get into the theatre until they solved an escape room series of puzzles, which he called ‘not feasible at all.’The Enigmatist/Supplied
Kwong was seven when he attended his first magic show with his dad, who has a PhD in biochemistry and remains, as far as his son is concerned, the smartest man in the world. The magician performed a classic trick – putting a little red sponge ball in Kwong’s hand that somehow became two –and then did it again on his dad.
“When my father opened his hand and suddenly had those two red sponge balls, I turned to this scientist who knows everything, and asked, ‘Dad, how did he do that?’” says Kwong. “And he just flashed me this sheepish grin and said, ‘I don’t know.’ And that’s when I knew I wanted to be a magician.”
Kwong makes a handkerchief disappear at a Chinese restaurant in Toronto.
As he worked tirelessly to perfect his riffles, palming and other effects, his mom, a history professor and avowed word nerd, introduced him to Scrabble and crosswords. “So I had this other parallel hobby, but you can clearly see the DNA they share,” says Kwong. “All magic tricks are puzzles.”
After college, he moved to L.A., where he landed a production job at DreamWorks Animation. On the side, though, he started doing a monthly “nerdy, cerebral” magic show that caught fire with Hollywood A-listers, who pushed him to make a go of it full time. He quit DreamWorks, became the magic consultant on the heist movie Now You See Me, and never looked back.
Kwong’s mother introduced him to Scrabble and crosswords as a child.Supplied
These days, he is, he says, “a full-time magish,” but he spends much of his time speaking to corporate audiences, pulling back the curtain on magic and how the brain works. He even wrote a book on the subject called Spellbound, which uses the seven principles of illusion to help leaders get ahead.
The idea for a magic show built around puzzles had been percolating for a while when he stumbled on the love story of pioneering cryptographers William and Elizebeth Friedman. The pair met at Riverbank, a secretive lab in Illinois built by eccentric textile tycoon George Fabyan, who was, among other things, obsessed with proving the Baconian theory – that Francis Bacon wrote the plays credited to Shakespeare and embedded them with a binary cipher.
“I decided to weave the narrative of this nerdy love story through these puzzly magic tricks,” says Kwong.
His original idea was that audience members couldn’t get into the theatre until they solved an escape room series of puzzles. “That, of course, is not feasible at all, unless you want an audience of four people,” he says.
For the record, my friend and I only solved two of the four riddles in the “puzzle garden” before show time and had to figure out the other two at the intermission – which was lucky, since they tie into the show later on. And I failed utterly at solving any of the puzzles during the show itself. But that didn’t matter one bit, because the whole thing is an absolute work of wonder. I won’t give any spoilers – you really have to see it to believe it, or at least let yourself be delightfully bamboozled by it.
