Harry Houdini was famous for escaping impossible situations: inside a locked box, wrapped in chains, or even in a sealed coffin submerged in water.
In Instructions for a Séance, Austin theater-maker, playwright and performer Katie Bender attempts something even more impossible: summoning Houdini’s spirit.
The solo show, which she’s performing next week at Fusebox Festival, was inspired by the Houdini archives at the Harry Ransom Center and explores caretaking, ambition and the urge to escape parts of your life.
Bender first began developing the piece in 2015 as a graduate student at UT Austin. Her mentor and professor Kirk Lynn knew she enjoyed taking audiences into the experience of moments of the unknown. He encouraged her to explore Houdini’s archives.
“I was immediately struck by just the kind of the force of Harry Houdini’s will and ambition,” she says.
Bender became fascinated by the photos of him midescape, as well as his letters.
“He has such a particular cadence,” she says. “It was something I started to really hear. And I felt like I was kind of channeling Houdini.”
She wrote some monologues that became the foundation of the piece. Originally, she imagined the work as a two-person play about Houdini’s life. But that shifted after she worked on the play with the actors. They were struggling to really hear Houdini’s voice, so Bender read the play out loud for them.
“Everybody was like — Oh, it’s really interesting having you play Houdini. … You know, I’m a woman. So I would never be cast as Harry Houdini,” she laughs. “And I think there was a kind of cheeky delight in this kind of historic drag of me having a good time playing this man.”
Bender rehearses for Instructions for a Séance on Monday. The show was inspired by the escape artist’s archives at the Harry Ransom Center.
As she continued to develop the piece, Bender revisited Houdini’s escape photos. At the time, she was navigating life as a working artist and mother of a young child.
“I would have these long extended fantasies about just going to Mexico alone and disappearing into the sunset,” she says. “I realized that I was just craving a kind of escape because I felt like I didn’t have a release valve in my own life.”
The images of Houdini midescape became a kind of lifeline. “The promise of the escape is sort of built into the image, and I think I really needed that.”
The question of how to pursue art, ambition and parenting at the same time grew central to the piece. Eventually, the project evolved into something more personal.
“I came to this realization that it really was a séance to contact Houdini to help me get some of that escape in my life,” she says.
To channel Houdini, Bender uses a collection of unusual artifacts: chains, handcuffs, a séance bell, tarot cards and a portrait of the escape artist. The collection is inspired by objects at the Harry Ransom Center that once belonged to him.
During the performance, Bender brings audience members into the experience by asking them to write down what they want to escape.
“I came to this realization that it really was a séance to contact Houdini to help me get some of that escape in my life.”
Katie Bender
“Everybody has something, you know?” she says. She grabs several stacks of small papers off her office windowsill and reads through them. “U.S. politics, inflation, war, headaches, back pain, stuff in my teeth, financial burdens, fundraising, the daily grind of a regular day job.”
Bender has been working on versions of the play for more than a decade. At the beginning, she wrote the piece, in part, to escape her family. And in some ways, it worked. Bender has gone on multiple trips around the country to develop and perform the séance.
“It has created the container for me to actually escape my family,” she says, “which was a thing I really, really wanted.”
But over time, her idea of ambition and what success looks like changed.
“I really wanted to be known in the world as an artist and not a mother when I started this process,” she says. “And I feel very different now.”
Now, she says, she’s thinking about bringing her family with her on her work trips.
“I no longer want to escape my family. My family is really the space of love and support in my life, and I need that.”
Bender has performed Instructions for a Séance across the country and will take it to Milwaukee this fall. But performing it in Austin feels special.
“I’m just so delighted to be able to do the séance in this community that is my home,” she says. “Austin itself is, I think, spiritually a really powerful place just because of the connection between the Edwards Aquifer below us and the movement of the Colorado River. The spirits, I feel like, are alive and well in Austin — and especially in Texas Performing Arts. There are some real ghosts in that building.”
As for Houdini?
“So far, the séance has failed,” she says. “I’ve never made contact with Houdini.” But that’s not really the point. “What happens next is always something that is really surprising.”
She hopes audiences leave with a renewed sense of wonder and connection to each other and to the possibilities of live performance.
“I hope that the guests leave the theater feeling newly engaged with what live performance can do,” she says, “gather a group of people together and commune together and try to escape our troubles together.”
Instructions for a Séance is directed by Lily Wolff and runs Thursday, April 16, through Sunday, April 19, at the Texas Performing Arts McCullough Theatre Rehearsal Room for Fusebox Festival. More information is available at fusebox.live.org.