Louise Casemore in Lucky Charm, Defiance Theatre at Found Festival 2025. Photo supplied
By Liz Nicholls, .ca
You know how a question slides into your brain at an oblique angle — and takes over — when you’re really supposed to be thinking about something else?
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Actor/playwright Louise Casemore has been there. And the result is Lucky Charm, the uniquely intriguing (and site-specific) solo show that is the mainstage presentation at this year’s Found Festival.
It happened in Banff, “in a solo (playwright’s) residency, and I was supposed to be working on a different play,” Casemore laughs. And then the fateful question overtook that script: “what would it have been like to be married to a person world famous for his ability to escape? Someone who intentionally puts themself in death’s way intentionally, all the time? What would that dinner conversation have been like?”
That person was Harry Houdini. And you are not alone if you didn’t know there was a remarkable and complicated love story attached (or should we say chained?) to him, a story remarkable both in life and after he died under mysterious circumstances. Did you know he was married? To a performer “with an act of her own? Casemore didn’t. “The more I learned the more I was shocked I’d never heard the story before, in the public sphere, in pop culture. I was astonished no one had taken a crack at Bess Houdini’s story before….” Research was irresistible. “And here we are, just over two years later, on the doorstep to a premiere.”
Louise Casemore in Lucky Charm, Found Festival 2025. Photo by Brianne Jang
The doorstep? Well, exactly. Lucky Charm opens Thursday at the home of Mrs. Houdini (a secret residential location in the Hazeldean neighbourhood), where she regularly tried to make contact with the dearly departed. It’s an invitation to the 1920s and the séance table or the onlookers’ gallery.
When Bess met Harry, as Casemore explains, she was a performer in her own right, with an act of her own, “a singer and dancer in the Coney Island pier vaudeville scene.” And when she took a back seat to assist the most celebrated magician in the world with his act, “she was instrumental, the major brain power, in helping Harry develop some of his most famous tricks.”
“In lots of ways his success came to define her position in life as well,” explains Casemore. “And, in a way quite tragically, she became the symbol of Harry’s legacy, keeping the throngs at bay, people desperate to break into his house and steal his secrets. She became the protector of his estate, much to the chagrin of the magic community in lots of ways.”
Lucky Charm by and starring Louise Casemore, Defiance Theatre at Found Festival 2025. Photo by Brianne Jang
There is a romantic love story attached to the Houdinis. And Casemore was struck, she said, by their common devotion to debunking spiritualism that was all the rage in the ‘20s, and exposing its practitioners and mediums as frauds — “their secondary mission in life.” Witness the very public falling out of Houdini and his friend Arthur Conan Doyle, a devoted spiritualist, at the time.
Lucky Charm is inspired by “the great irony” of the Houdinis’ mutual agreement that “If Harry were to die, Bess would hold a séance so he could prove for once and for all whether was an afterlife. Which really became the foundation of the play.” It was, says Casemore, a case of Harry announcing to the world, in effect, “you can trust me on this; if I can’t do it, no one can.”
Casemore, who trained as an actor in Fort McMurray, has a U of A master’s degree in theatre practice (her specialty is playwriting for immersive theatre). And Lucky Charm isn’t the first time she’s been attracted to taking theatre to unusual, intimate locations (her mantra: “small capacity shouldn’t be small theatre”). She’d been directing and producing her own indie work for almost a decade in 2015 when the Fringe director of the time Thomas Scott wondered if by chance she had a piece she’d like to try in a new bar near the Fringe grounds. It was the basement of the Mexican bistro bar El Cortez. “I felt it was a low-risk opportunity,” she says. So that’s where Casemore premiered her Sterling Award-winning Fringe hit OCD, which went on to tour the country. Functional and GEMINI followed.
Undressed did play an actual theatre, the Martha Cohen, in a production by Calgary’s Alberta Theatre Projects. But it was reconfigured for Casemore’s theatrical purposes. “We were having a full-on auction (of used wedding dresses). So, an unconventional experience in a conventional space,” as she puts it.
Louise Casemore in Lucky Charm, Defiance Theatre at Found Festival 2025. Photo by Brianne Jang
With Lucky Charm, “I was so fascinated about using a real home, where we have to be polite about wiping our feet … a place with carpet and shoes, with a life.” Bess, after all, “held séances in her home, and never charged … as part of her promise to Harry.” The world was cruel: “she was called a charlatan and a gold-digger — even though she didn’t make money” from the séances. Casemore found herself wanting to “to give a voice to this woman who’d had such a challenging and interesting life.”
Casemore laughs. “One of the key points of my affection for Bess was that she was notoriously unlikeable.” Casemore’s “actor brain,” she says, was galvanized by that sour, difficult personality: “what’s simmering underneath that? I was keen as an actor to take on that challenge as well.”
At last year’s Found, Lucky Charm had a workshop, as the first year of Casemore’s two-year Fresh AiR residency at the festival. And she discovered that the audience was quite affected by the persistence of Bess, a career skeptic, in trying to make contact beyond the grave. “There are so many rituals surrounding loss.” Casemore points out. “And if there’s even a chance, maybe …. Part of it is hope, grief, wishful thinking.” And, of course, there’s the possibility of magic.
Lucky Charm
Found Festival 2025
Theatre: Defiance Theatre, presented by a partnership between the Found Festival and Theatre YES
Written by: Louise Casemore
Directed by: Max Rubin
Starring: Louise Casemore with Jake Tkaczyk
Where: “a secret residential location in Hazeldean neighbourhood”
Running: Wednesday through July 20
Tickets: commongroundarts.ca (currently sold out, but there’s a waiting list plus another option, soon to be announced)
