Danielle Skraastad and John Alejandro Jeffords in Legerdemain. Photo: Harry Zernike

“I’m not a writer anymore. I’m just, like, a person.” “A person? Why? People are the worst.”

A bunch of life circumstances, professional and personal, have conspired to throw Devin (Danielle Skraastad) off course: she was a writer who taught at Harvard, now she’s a waitress at a chain restaurant in New England, who guards Tuesday as her one day a week to have a soul. Devin may not have a lot of friends, but she gets entirely enough of people. Too many customers. Too much determined scrappiness from her manager, Chuck (Annie Henk). Then Don (John Alejandro Jeffords) sneaks up on her in the restaurant alley as she tries to coax a flame out of a broken lighter. He’s a customer, but he seems to know a little too much about her. Like her middle name. Like her journal that he pulled out of the trash. Is he a stalker? A crush? A fan? A murderer? (There’s a strangler on the loose. Maybe. Or maybe it’s just Halloween in New England and things are getting a little weird.) Is he a lonely guy who recognizes a fellow soul who’s dabbling in misanthropy to avoid heartache? Or is he just a magician who needs an audience? 

“Magic,” Don says, quoting his father, who taught him magic tricks and then staged his own disappearing act when Don was a child, “reminds us reality is always subject to change.” 

There has, of course, to be magic in a play called Legerdemain (Sleight of Hand), and it’s part of playwright Lynn Rosen and director Julie Kramer’s cleverness that there’s magic as metaphor; magic as plot device in the story–also called “Legerdemain”–that Devin had given up on writing until Don came along and found it; and magic as just plain stage magic (the omnipresent Steve Cuiffo is the magic consultant and Gary Weinstein is credited as a sleight-of-hand coach, which is a delightful credit). All those balls stay in the air at once, playing off each other. 

There’s a little bit of real mysticism going on around Devin—streetlights flickering in and out as she passes, strange noises in the air and shadows on the back wall of Pete Betcher’s grimy and authentic alley set. (Yang Yu’s lighting and Grace Oberhofer’s sound design operate with just the right balance of mystique and plausible deniability.) Is she just losing her grip? Is reality reminding her that it needs to change? Or is Don messing with her? Then there’s the Strangler. Devin mostly doesn’t believe in the Strangler, but then again Devin’s built a very intentional high wall between her and her complicated emotions and her past mistakes. Skraastad strikes just the right balance of leading with Devin’s brassiness and only occasionally letting something softer sneak in–but we always know it’s there on Tuesdays, even if we don’t get to see it.

Don has a magic trick to pull out of his coat at every turn of conversation. His magic is about 80 percent successful, which is kind of perfect: too skilled, and it wouldn’t go along with how hard he’s trying to impress; too incompetent, and he’d be pathetic rather than a little charming in his eagerness and his earnestness. Rosen and Kramer find plenty of visual gags in both his successes and his failures (my personal favorite is his offering an upset Devin a handkerchief that turns into a magician’s string of rainbow scarves), and Jeffords has a wonderful way of using each as a small emotional reveal. A little piece of his heart is embedded in every magic banana and disappearing lighter. 

Devin feels like everyone wants something from her: Chuck is desperate to have her work a pre-wedding brunch on Tuesday. Don wants her to finish the story that he thinks was written just for him. But what does Devin want? Safety? Nicotine? Relief from a grief she’s barely begun to grapple with?

That story that Devin threw away is all about the healing powers of real magic—and it will sprinkle a little bit of emotional sparkle over Devin and Don, giving them a way into a friendship that might otherwise have never gotten off the ground. And as she starts to open up, just a little, to the possibility of getting her own mojo–her writing–back, she and Don begin to truly connect over her story “Legerdemain.” Don takes on the role of assistant/sidekick to Devin’s “Grigor the Great, ancient magician,” in life and in art. (Costume designer Patricia Marjorie’s Butterloaf waitress uniforms hit the right note, but her over-the-top robes for Grigor and assistant Don Juan really shine.) 

Everything is just a little bit heightened here, and against the backdrop of the grimy alley in a tiny space, the performances bounce off each other with fierce energy: Skraastad’s Devin beaten-down and defensive and fighting off her own vulnerabilities; oHenk’s Chuck still striving for optimism in a world where she’s still stuck living with her parents; Jeffords’s Don cringingly awkward but also pure in his belief that he’s found the thing that saves him. We feel the genuine push and pull of three people, each prickly in their own way, trying to find their way to friendship, and forward in life. 

Because the underlying dynamic is already operating at that heightened pitch, the scenes within “Legerdemain” the story don’t have room to grow much more stylized, and I might like a little more abandon to the flourish of fantasy fiction. Conversely, the one thing that feels comparatively underplayed is the Strangler—perhaps because of the Halloween setting, he never feels like more than a myth, a tease to explain why the weird Don might be a real threat, until the moment he actually plays into the plot. It’s the logic of a magic trick–we dismiss until we see it happen–but there’s room for a little more ambiguity, a little more build, there, I think. 

That logic of the magic trick sees us through to an ending that’s perhaps a twist too neat, a quick time-jump that sees everything shift into something new, something better. But then again, that’s the point of magic: to remind us that reality is subject to change, in unexpected ways.