Review: In The Hope Theory, Helder Guimarães Attempts to Conjure Magic from His Immigration Story

Living through this dystopian Age of AI Slop almost makes one miss the previous one, the Age of Content. The merciless social media algorithms that ruled our attention dictated that a recipe also had to be a eulogy for a beloved grandmother, and a stand-up set also had to be a manifesto on race. Most of the time, it didn’t work; but when it did—when laughing at the joke also made you think about the harms of institutional racism in a new light, or making the pizza made you miss your own nonna, it felt like…well, magic.

This quaint feat is precisely what magician Helder Guimarães attempts in The Hope Theory, a sleight-of-hand performance that is also a one-man show about his immigration to the United States. As the lights go up, Guimarães stands in what looks like a very nice studio apartment (set by François-Pierre Couture), with unpacked boxes sitting atop a gorgeous rug—which, as any audience member at a magic show, I could not wait for him to pull out from under us. Indeed, Guimarães seems to want to lull us into a false sense of normalcy before the mind-blowing begins, regaling us with platitudes about Americans’ clueless responses when learning he’s from Portugal (“Oh, that’s near Ecuador, right?” or “I love Spain!”).

But the first trick did not quite fill me with awe. Talking about the dictatorship that his family lived through in Portugal, Guimarães has members of the audience pick out different cards from a deck—cards that he transforms into the same one, to show us how oppressive regimes bring about groupthink and conformity. I raised an eyebrow. The suppression of freedom of speech did not strike me as the most natural subject for a card trick, trivializing the former while giving undue seriousness to the latter. Alas, this set the tone for the rest of the night.

Guimarães’s journey of arriving in America at 29 to pursue his dreams of magic stardom has plenty in common with mine: We were both at one time on “Alien of Extraordinary Abilities” visas, we were both strivers in the entertainment industry, we have both been treated as stupid because of our accents—but I struggled to connect to it. For one, the most impactful beats of the story (such as having visa sponsorship used as a form of coercion, something I’ve written about at length) don’t happen to Guimarães, but rather to his partner Catarina, making me wish she was telling the story instead. And whenever the story does get going, it’s interrupted by a magic trick with a facile (or outright nonsensical) connection to the matter at hand. Guessing in which hand a patron is holding a coin showcases the need to trust your gut when chasing your dreams, while cards marking the order of our arrival are used to demonstrate the evils of the “I was here first” xenophobic mentality.

I eventually gave up on the narration, chalking it up to an unfortunate bit of “relevant” window dressing for the magic. But the magic itself underwhelmed me (and judging by the sparse clapping around me, I wasn’t alone). Guimarães does not tell you in advance what to expect from each trick, so you never know where it’s going. That usually led me to either correctly guess the reveal, robbing me of the awe that a magic show promises, or to find it random (“Sure, I guess the card is on the other side of the window”). My biggest question throughout was not the desired “how did he do that?” but rather “why does this objectively good trick not feel amazing?”

It does not help that director Frank Marshall runs the whole show at a frantic pace. The lights (by Martha Carter) respond so fast to each emotional beat that I had to squint to keep from being blinded, while the sound effects (by James Grabowski) and music (composed by Jeff Beal) sometimes don’t have time to finish playing before Guimarães moves on to the next thing.

There are small touches, both in the production and the script, that suggest thoughtfulness. An anecdote about the Portuguese custom of climbing atop a chair while counting down the New Year came back a couple of times, each with renewed meaning. An early joke about the Muppets resulted in a delightful prop reveal later.

The most affecting gesture, though, was the quietest. Throughout the performance, Guimarães slowly unpacks the apartment. I had my eye on him the whole time, thinking that maybe the whole set would turn out to be part of a trick. But in the end, all that happened was that the apartment was unpacked. Achieving the almost impossible feat of making a home in a new country, this seemed to suggest, is its own kind of magic trick.