Tricks of the stage: Penn & Teller return Friday to Northern Quest

Penn Jillette and Teller first performed together in 1974. In the subsequent 40 years, the comedic magic duo has written several books, created films, had hit television shows, played on Broadway, and since 2001 has performed at the Rio All-Suites Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas.

So Penn & Teller don’t have to take their act on the road. But they do, squeezing in gigs across the country on Fridays – their one night off when the show at the the Rio is running. This weekend, they return to Northern Quest Resort & Casino for their first show in the area in six years.

Jillette, the taller and more talkative half of the duo (Teller – his legal name – stays mostly silent on stage), said earlier this week that there’s little economic pressure to go on to road. “We’re more successful than we ever planned,” he said. But they still do it.

“We love doing the show. We love being on the road. We get asked all the time why we’re not slowing down. What am I going to do, play golf?” Jillette said. “I still practice juggling every day. I still practice card tricks every day. I play guitar and bass every day. I still practice, not quite like I did when I was 16, when I was crazy with practice, but I still practice quite a bit and truly enjoy it.”

He added with a laugh, “You can tell I really enjoy doing shows on the road by the fact that I do them.”

That practice pays off in a show that is lively and polished and fun. There’s an appeal to live performance that can’t be denied, Jillette said.

“Andy Warhol once said, ‘If you’re going to the same situation comedy every week, why don’t you do the exact same situation comedy every week, so you get really good at it?’ So we always want to have a few things in the show that we’ve done 10,000 times. Because audiences do not get the opportunity to see anything that someone has done 10,000 times. Anything. I can tell you the trick that I saw Teller do when we first got together and that he occasionally does now, he does better, not just than when I first saw him, but better than a year ago.”

So the show they bring to the West Plains on Friday will have a good mix of old and new, he said. Some tricks they simply can’t tour because of transportation issues. Their famous double bullet catch, where they simultaneously fire bullets at each other and catch them in their mouths, doesn’t travel because, Jillette said frankly, it’s too much of a hassle to fill out all the paperwork required to transport the guns across state lines.

(And actually, it’s not in the Vegas show these days either, even though it’s generally considered one of the best tricks ever. Jillette said they had a new bit they wanted to end the show with, so the gun trick has been tucked away for the time being.)

In their live show, Penn & Teller freely admit that everything they’re doing is a trick. They never allude to anything “magical” or “supernatural” – notions that are anathema to these two outspoken atheists.

“Teller and I proudly use the word ‘trick.’ To us it’s an intellectual term,” he said. “Some magicians try to use the word ‘illusion’ because it’s three syllables, to sound more pretentious and highfalutin. We use tricks, and tricks are simply the playful exploration of how we ascertain knowledge.”

In other words, it’s all an act. Obviously, when a magician is sawing someone in half, the audience isn’t watching a homicide, and they realize that, he said. Penn & Teller pride themselves on being truthful to their audience, except in the moment when they’re using sleight of hand or distraction to make a trick work. The magic is in the skill it takes to fool an audience.

“Within the (theater) it’s fine for us to lie in the details, but we cannot lie in the act, and that’s a really important point to me,” Jillette said. “And I would say it’s one of the most important points not just in my career but also in my life.”

They’re also noted libertarians and skeptics; their long-running Showtime series, “Penn & Teller: BS!” sought to debunk theories on everything from gun control and Feng Shui to weight loss and the war on drugs. Their most recent show, “Penn & Teller: Fool Us,” returning to the CW in July, challenges magicians to trick the tricksters, with winners earning a opening slot for the Penn & Teller show at the Rio.

Jillette said his oft-discussed political and social views haven’t hurt their act with audiences. Despite their atheism, for instance, Jillette said they draw many Christian fans who want to see a good magic show performed with passion and ideas. “We really understand that people are different and have different feelings and don’t hold that against them,” he said.

And while he might mention something political or religious in passing during a show, talking about those topics is not why he’s there on stage that night.

“In the live show, there’s magic to do,” he said. “Simply because I can talk politics on TV, and I can’t really, really do magic that rips your heart out on TV because there’s a wall, a screen between us. When I’m live in the theater, you know what the rules of time and space and physics are, and so I can do stuff that will rip your heart out and show it to you, so I really don’t have time to talk religion or politics.”