Interview: Jason Suran Discusses SEANCE and the Magical World He's Creating

You don't believe in ghosts, do you?

This Halloween, for one week only, A Taste of Magic presents THE SÉANCE, an immersive performance experience of intrigue, terror, and the unexplained. In an intimate, round-table setting - not unlike the séances that became wildly popular in the early 20th century - magician and performer Jason Suran takes audiences on a theatrical journey through the dark and fascinating history of the séance, and attempts to cross the elusive border between our world and something... beyond. With audience capacity limited to 12 seats per performance, The Séance offers a truly intimate and uniquely chilling Halloween entertainment, complete with ghost stories, voodoo, and other things that go "bump" in the night.

The Séance will play 21 performances only, October 25 - 31 at 7PM, 9PM, and 11PM at Highlight Studios in New York City. The Séance is written and directed by Eli Bosnick.

Jason Suran sat down with BroadwayWorld to discuss coming up with the idea for THE SÉANCE, how he got started with magic and the idea behind A TASTE OF MAGIC. Check out the full interview below.

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Can you tell us a little bit about THE SÉANCE and what it's about?

It's a little bit haunted house, it's a little bit historical recreation and it's a little bit dinner party. It's almost like a prelude to a creepy evening. It's almost like a creepy little dinner party for you and your friends. It's an exploration of a classic 19th or 20th century Victorian séance. How it was done, who did it, why they did and why it stopped being done.

How did the idea for Séance and it being this immersive show come about? Have you always wanted to do something like this?

I've had an impulse to do this for almost three years. For three years I've been wanting to do something like this and then last year year I sort of had a relationship with a place in Brooklyn called "The Urban Cowboy," which is a fantastical, wonderful, Instagram perfect, bed and breakfast out in Williamsburg. They have this wonderful wooden cabin, it's their luxury unit. Their luxury unit is a wooden cabin in the backyard decorated with all of these Native American tapestry's and we were talking one night. They were having a dinner party there and they said, 'We want you to do a show here, what could you do?' I sort of looked around the space and said, 'Let me do a séance!' Then I went to my producer and we sort of said, 'Alright how do we do a séance?'

So, we read everything we could get our hands on. We looked at all these mediums because we're not psychics, we're not mediums, we very much try not to propagate that kind of work, so how do you do a séance from the perspective of an enthusiast and if not a true believer? How do you do it from the perspective of someone who loves this stuff and wants it to stay in existence, but doesn't necessarily want people to think they've spoken to their grandmother that night. So we set out from that perspective and we just tried to go based on our love of the material and let that sort of inform the character, the show and the story that we have. It's a lot of fun. We basically recreate a séance using the exact same tricks that mediums would've used a 120 to 130 years ago. It's a lot of fun.

So, how did you get started with magic? Is it something you've always wanted to pursue?

Actually not at all. I didn't touch a deck of playing cards until I was 18 years old. It was because of a girl. I was dating a girl whose father was a professional magician. He flew out from L.A to take us to lunch and I was really crazy about her so I wanted to learn a card trick to impress him. So, I learned how to make a card disappear with my hand, that was it. He was like, 'Oh that was very good.' So, he took the deck of cards from me and said, 'Can I show you something?' and he was just like miracle, miracle, miracle, miracle and I was so hooked. I wanted to learn how to do that, how do I do that? That relationship didn't last, but for Christmas that year he sent me my very first magic book. I had never spoken to him since the day at lunch, but he just sent me this book Royal Road to Card Magic and in the post break-up blues I just pealed through it.

So, I got a job as an usher immediately. I just went out and looked for a magic community and the first person I found was Eli Bosnick and he was on an old Facebook page for an NYU magic club that had not had any activity for five years or so. So I emailed Eli him and I wanted to know how to start this club back up and I came to meet him at his current job where he was an usher at Monday Night Magic and then they gave me a job there as an usher too. From there every Monday night I just got to hang out with the best magicians in the city and some of the best in the world because they would pass through. So, I would learn that way and I always had a very strong interest in psychology and storytelling and I sort of found myself being draw towards the mentalism, which is a lot of what séance and medium work gave birth to. The people who wanted to do those tricks, but didn't want to say they were talking to ghosts would call themselves mentalists.

So, you are a founding member of A Taste of Magic with Eli Bosnick, how did that start?

That is entirely Eli, I wish I could take credit for it because it's such a great idea, but it was 100% Eli. A lot of the founding members of A Taste of Magic were ushers at Monday Night Magic for years and years and eventually we just felt that it was time to move on and the thought was leaving wasn't right unless we were going to do something else with that time. We knew we didn't want to compete with Monday Night Magic because they do an amazing stage show every Monday night that everyone should go see.

So we said, 'How can we do them justice? How can we create something that is different and new and pays homage to it but isn't competition?' We looked around and we found that there is no dinner magic in New York City, there's no dinner shows we could think of on a Saturday night or at all. So, that's what we created. It's been really, really fun and really successful and it's an amazing thing to be part of.

What are you bring to Séance that will differ from your other shows?

This is much more of a play. This is much more of a theatrical evening. It's an entire world that we bring you into and almost a guided tour through the history of the McCabe. In that sense, it's very different from my show, which is very much mind reading and demonstrations and a play in the sense, but this is very much a story we're telling. We are talking about the people who popularized this art form, who would rise to incredible levels of fame at the time and who eventually rode it all the way down as skepticism and scientific thinking became the trend and they were left in the dust.

Jason Suran, a New York based Magician, is one of the most sought after performers of mindreading magic in America. His unique blend of psychology and deception has led him around the world from private shows in the hills of Italy to an upcoming stage show in the Caribbean. In addition to his work abroad, Jason is a regular fixture at some of the most exclusive venues in New York. He has perfomed close up magic at Carnegie Hall, read minds on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, and has captivated celebrities in living rooms and private clubs across the city including The Soho House and The National Arts Club. He takes no responsibility for any bent spoons found at any of these locations.

Originally from Chicago, Jason first moved east to attend New York University where he studied Theatre and Film History. His love of storytelling steered him towards magic and more specifically ... the history and methods of modern psychics. The first mindreading effect he learned was how to guess which hand someone hides a coin in 10 times in a row and he never did a rope trick again. After years of refining his craft on multiple stages (and in 3 different languages) Jason has emerged as one of the most in-demand performers of psychological magic to date. He is a regular performer at New York's two top-rated magic shows - A Taste of Magic and Monday Night Magic.

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