Skipping through a mind field

After having just seen Mind Games I’m waiting at the theatre bar to interview its creator and star, Marc Salem. And I can’t decide whether I should make a break for it or silently pray that his publicist will phone to tell me Salem doesn’t feel up to it. For, if the way this guy blithely decoded impenetrable matrices of human behaviour during his stage show is anything to go by, within seconds of meeting me he’ll have unveiled every deep, dark and sordid secret buried in the million shallow graves in the shady recesses of my past.

I’ll unconsciously scratch my chin a certain way and he’ll pounce, yelling, ‘Aha! And you thought no one would ever find out about the time you deliberately ran over your girlfriend’s poodle!”

Or I’ll absently doodle in my notepad and he’ll say: ‘Don’t think I don’t know what really happened to that money you collected for the Feed The Babies Fund in standard seven.”

So when the publicist phones to say Salem will be with me in a minute I gulp down a double scotch and attempt to put on my best poker face. Which, thankfully, turns out to be wholly unnecessary. For Salem is the most ingenuous, intelligent, amicable and disarming fellow you could ever hope to hold a spirited and sincere conversation with.

Despite his intimidating reputation and towering body of experience in the most rarefied psychological climes, Salem is a man with both feet on the ground; a quick-witted, sharp-eyed fox far more interested in applying his mind to everyday life than revelling in the vainglory of his considerable accomplishments.

Distinguished academic; off-Broadway star; celebrated behavioural psychologist; undisputed world champion of non-verbal communication; droll comedian and ordinary bloke, Salem is one of those rare people who can seamlessly meld heavyweight intellectual nous with the levity of fun and entertainment.

A born showman, Salem soon found that holding down dual full-time careers as an academic and actor was an unsustainable scenario and thus discovered a way to roll these passions into one: adapt the powerful cerebral content of academia into the crowd-wowing delights of performance and hey presto! Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde become one and the same and the Oliver Sachs of the stage is born.

Consider the following as evidence of in how high a regard Salem’s unparalleled powers of perception are held: he was responsible for screening the jury in the largest court case in American history (State of Florida v US Tobacco Corporation); he significantly boosted the fortunes of football team the New York Giants by sharpening the cognitive abilities of the players (‘Professional sport is an environment where its down to a split-second advantage — I teach the players how to slow time down by speeding up the mind.”); and is constantly sought after by police departments around the world to enhance the perceptual powers of high-ranking officers (‘I don’t deal in guilt and innocence but in truth and untruth. I train policemen in techniques to distinguish between the two in the latter realm.”).

All this experience and all these abilities are brought to life on stage in Salem’s remarkable show Mind Games, which is characterised by as much comedic talent as it is by astonishing mental muscle.

‘If I have a sixth sense its a sense of humour,” Salem tells me in typically modest fashion, but his show is indeed testament to this. Ribbing a late arrival, Salem tells the woman he can read her mind and, as proof, holds up a large board upon which is written: ‘Do you know what is on the other side of this board?” ‘No!” shouts the woman. Salem turns the board around and on the other side is written: ‘No!”

Yet Salem goes to pains to point out he is neither a mind-reader nor a magician — simply someone with an acutely honed gift for deciphering non-verbal communication. During a brief, blindfolded and apparently arbitrary conversation with an audience member he is able to tell that some time in the past year she was planning a trip to Mexico but at the last moment decided to go to Italy instead. He is completely correct.

How does he do it? ‘Intuition. Experience. Training,” he says. Briefly flying his academic colours he invokes the great post-structuralists of the age, Barthes and McLuhan, by declaring: ‘People are not text, they are context. I have spent my life attempting to overcome the tyranny of the visual and I believe this is what gives me the ability to ‘read’ people on an entirely different level.”

He could, of course, also use audience plants, but on this subject Salem is emphatic.

Signs outside the theatre declare ‘Marc Salem will give anyone a $10 000 dollar reward if they can prove he uses plants.” But, he must confess, ‘I did use plants once. But that was in the Sixties and I’d rather not talk about it.”

Catch Marc Salem’s Mind Games at the Playhouse Market Theatre in Durban until March 21 and at the State Theatre in Pretoria from March 27 to April 11. Book at Computicket