Flim Flam

I have just read Flim Flam: Houdini and the Hereafter, the newly published edition of a play written by Gene Franklin Smith. Flim Flam premiered at the Malibu Playhouse last year to good notices, and it ran from June into August. I can see why – it is fun and engaging.

(Full disclosure: I have known and admired Gene Smith for years. When I started dating the woman whom I married 30 years ago (we are still married), she was house-managing a production of his play Life Beneath the Roses in New York City.)

Flim Flam depicts how Harry Houdini, the great magician and escape artist, set off in the later years of his life to explore – and debunk if appropriate – spiritualism: the belief that had become common starting in the United States before the Civil War, that the dead could and did communicate with the living. The play, set in the 1920s and after, depicts Harry Houdini and his wife as skeptics who remain, in the slightest degree, tantalizing alive to the possibility that communication with the dead, despite the rampant fraud pervading spiritualism, might be possible.

The possibility that the living could be assured by their deceased loved ones that there was an afterlife and they were happy in it was what made spiritualism so attractive to so many people and made them willing to be duped in the process.

Spiritualism was a popular enthusiasm that rose, persisted for decades, and then subsided. Some people believed in spirits beforehand, and some believe today. Although it seems slightly sacrilegious to say so, any belief in the supernatural, including holding conventional religious beliefs, predisposes one to belief in the existence of the spirit world.

In 1848 a pair of sisters in Hydesville, New York reported that they had made contact with the spirit world as evidenced by a series of knocking sounds through which the spirits responded to questions. Others soon found that they had powers as mediums to communicate with the spirits, who became more articulate, for example, by speaking through the voice of the medium, writing with the hand of the medium or causing the medium to paint pictures.

More than a mere curiosity, some people found a religious experience in spiritualism, believing that these spiritual messengers could carry the word of divinity directly to individuals residing in the world of the living. In a sense this was a mere extension of the liberalizing and democratizing trend of Protestant Christian theology at the time that was emphasizing the worshipper’s personal personal experience with divinity and changing the role of the clergy from intercessors to spiritual advisers. At the same time, the activities of some reformers tended to alienate them from the churches in which they had worshipped, and spiritualism offered them the possibility of religious engagement without disapproval from the pulpit.

The materials published with Flim Flam emphasize that it reflects extensive historical research and presents a largely accurate portrait of the individuals and events. I accept that as given although I am certain, like any work of drama based upon fact, it takes some license to fill the gaps in the historical record, for the sake of the dramatic construction and to hone its inner emotional truth. It is clever and makes for lively reading. I am sorry to have missed seeing it on stage.