A reminder of the marvelous Houdini Performances in March of 2022 

Ladies and Gentlemen—step this way and take your seats. You’re in for an amazing show!  Coming to a theatre near you is the legendary escape artist Harry Houdini as imagined by Muriel Rukeyser, a prolific American author and among the most important post-WWII Jewish writers. First performed in 1973, with Christopher Walken as Houdini and Neva Small as Bess, the musical Houdini combines song and dance, comedy and pathos.

While capturing Houdini’s transformation from Hungarian-born Eric Weisz, son of a rabbi, to the most celebrated escape artist of all times, the musical dramatizes the tension between the escape artist who can break any lock and the man who is inescapably bound to his mother, to his wife, Bess, and to the very myth he helped create. Along the way, the play challenges us to consider how we respond to gender inequality, racial bigotry, religious persecution, and the power of magic. 

Houdini did his most dangerous exploit in Detroit, when, as a publicity stunt, he leaped from Belle Isle Bridge–handcuffed, chained, and leg-ironed–into the icy Detroit River. As legend has it, the river was frozen, and he entered it through a small hole in the ice. Rukeyser’s musical devotes a gripping scene to Houdini’s narrow escape from death.  Twenty years later, in 1926, Houdini performed his last show in Detroit, even though he suffered from a burst appendix.  He died a week later in Detroit’s Grace Hospital.

Thanks to a grant from the Michigan Humanities–an affiliate of the National Endowment of the Humanities–as well as the support of EMU’s Center for Jewish Studies and the English Department, the Muriel Rukeyser Living Archive is putting on four public events dedicated to Houdini.  Helping us fight the doldrums of Covid, winter, and the multitude of “locks” that constrain us, each event combines a staged reading of the play with lively conversation about Rukeyser and the great magician:

  • March 20, 2022, 2pm. Sponberg Theatre, Eastern Michigan University
  • March 24, 2022, 7pm. Riverside Arts Center, Ypsilanti, Michigan
  • March 26, 2022, 8pm. Matrix Theatre, Detroit, Michigan
  • March 27, 2022, 3pm. Matrix Theatre, Detroit, Michigan

The inaugural Houdini performance at 2pm on Sunday March 20 at EMU’s Sponberg Theatre will be preceded, at 11am, by a forum that brings together three engaging experts: the poet and founder of Paris Press, Jan Freeman; the poet and Rukeyser scholar Stefania Heim; and University of Michigan Professor of Film, Television and Media Matthew Solomon. Those interested in gaining deeper understanding of Rukeyser’s fascination with Houdini are invited to register for this forum at https://emich.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_7bNbVf0GTXmSdut9I2l_kw.

The second performance, at Riverside Arts Center, on Thursday, March 24, at 7pm, is designed  to appeal to a younger audience alive to the magic of poetry and the imagination, as well as to encourage their response. In collaboration with YpsiWrites, a writing-focused non-profit organization serving the Ypsilanti area, we invite local youth to submit poems for a Poetry Wall displayed at Riverside Arts Center, prior to the performance.  The poetry submission form as well as teacher and student guides to Rukeyser and Houdini are available on the YpsiWrites website (https://www.ypsiwrites.com/ ) and on the Muriel Rukeyser Living Archive (murielrukeyser.emuenglish.org).

The final two performances, on March 26 and 27, will take place at Detroit’s Matrix Theatre, a community theater dedicated to the creation and production of original plays and education in play writing, performance, and puppetry for people of all ages.

Under the direction of EMU Theatre Professor Lee Stille, the talented actors of EMU’s Theatre Program will bring the musical to life in each of four staged readings. Using scripts, and relying on language, movement, and the audience’s imagination the performers will conjure up Rukeyser’s magical telling of Houdini’s story.

Rukeyser began thinking about her play on Harry Houdini at least as early as the late 1930s, when the world was in dire need of superheroes to defeat the atrocities of fascism. To the consternation of critics, her musical combines biography and fantasy to challenge, as Jan Freeman writes, “the locks and constraints that imprison us all.” Houdini’s dramatic transformation from Hungarian-born Eric Weisz, son of a rabbi, to the most celebrated escape artist of all times embodies the American dream of self-invention against all odds.  His elaborate stunts in pursuit of freedom speak powerfully to our present moment, as the world is engulfed in Covid and the U.S. is confronting its history of systemic racism and struggles to reaffirm the meanings of democracy and freedom in an ever more divided nation. The fact that Rukeyser collaborated with her long-time partner Monica McCall on composing the verse-drama intimates, as well, desires for emotional and sexual freedom that continue to be salient today.

Eric Weisz was four years old when his family emigrated from Hungary to the U.S. where life proved hard. Young Ehrich Weiss, as he had been renamed, was eager to escape the poverty of his childhood and set out to reinvent himself.  By the time he became Harry Houdini, he had been a circus and vaudeville performer, King of the Cards, Erik the Great, among other incarnations.  It is as escape artist that he first found fame in England, then Germany and Russia, where in 1903, shortly after the Kishinev pogrom, which all but destroyed the Jewish Community of the small Russian town of Kishinev, he wowed audiences (and humiliated imperial law enforcement) by breaking out of handcuffs, prison vans, even, so legend has it, a Siberian prison camp. Houdini appealed to Rukeyser as a quintessential Jewish-American superhero, fighting the evils of fascism and antisemitism while proclaiming freedom as the birthright of every individual. But in her hands he becomes even more: an avatar for the transformative, freeing power of faith and imagination in the face of debilitating oppressions and fears, a champion for anyone—working people, women, Jews, African Americans, and queer people—fighting for justice and recognition. 

The Houdini events are designed to alert Southeast Michigan audiences to Eastern Michigan University’s Rukeyser resources and to the poet’s many creative pursuits–her poetry, prose, journalism, plays, and her visions for the world. Rukeyser insisted that the potential, the seemingly impossible, is just as real as anything else. With Houdini she gave us a fully human hero who shows us how to open even the most intractable locks, escape any constraints, and strive always for more freedom, more imagination, more democracy.