Duo’s greatest trick? Sticking together

Penn and Teller It sounds like an odd recipe for success, but the shocking yet cerebral Penn and Teller have built a career performing magic for people who hate magic shows.

The pair will bring their mix of magic and comedy to the Thousand Oaks Civic Arts Plaza tonight, Fri., Nov. 6.

Fans of the duo—who’ve performed together for more than three decades—know to expect the unusual.

Penn, the only one of the two who speaks on stage and in interviews, said last week in a phone interview their family-friendly show will respect the intelligence of the audience.

“We’ll be turning one person into another,” he said. “We’ll be pulling animals out of nowhere— all of the standard magic stuff but with intellectual content and not ever saying, ‘Ha, ha, ha, we can do this and you can’t.’”

Teller, one of the few people to have a U.S. passport issued in a single name, met Penn Fraser Jillette in 1975. Each was performing a separate magic act on the same bill. According to Penn, Teller had discovered earlier in his career that if he stopped talking during his performance and did “intensely creepy stuff,” the audience, usually noisy frat boys, would tire of heckling him and pay more attention.

When the two teamed up, they found another benefit to Teller’s remaining silent. If they don’t talk to each other onstage, they can completely face the audience.

“It feels natural, but it’s very, very unusual” for a comedy act, Penn said. Audiences have traditionally watched comedy duos look at and interact with each other—the Smothers Brothers, Abbott and Costello, Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis. But with only Penn talking, he and Teller can interact directly with the audience.

“We find it more interesting,” Penn said.

In the beginning, he said, he and Teller never imagined they would achieve the level of success they have. They wanted only to earn as much money as their fathers, doing work they loved.

But by 1985, their off-Broadway show was receiving high praise and they had earned an Emmy for a PBS special. They went on to win critical acclaim for their national tours and to appear in films and numerous TV shows, including “Late Night with David Letterman,” “The Tonight Show with Jay Leno” and as animated guests on “The Simpsons.” They’ve created a number of TV and cable specials in addition to writing three books.

For the past five years, Penn and Teller have headlined at their own theater in the Rio All-Suite Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas. Their Emmy-nominated series “Penn and Teller: BS!” is entering its seventh year on Showtime, and they’re working on a pilot for an hourlong weekly TV show called “Penn and Teller Solve Crimes.”

Early in their career, the duo developed their offbeat approach to magic after performing at birthday parties and in street shows in front of people more distracted than interested. To win an audience’s attention, Penn and Teller began attempting evermore startling feats. By the time their show hit off-Broadway, public hanging was a part of the act.

“Now that we had people’s attention and now that we had a situation where they could really focus, we started doing stuff that was outside of any magic we’d seen, heard about or read about,” Penn said.

He attributes their nearly 35 years together to a partnership built on mutual respect and not affection.

“When we’re unhappy with each other, that’s daily,” Penn said. “But it does not touch the respect. . . . We both know we do better together than separately.”

With success has come the luxury of being apart. In the early years, the two were together constantly—setting up shows and tearing down afterward, driving from one gig to another in one car, sharing hotel rooms. Tension between them was due to proximity, Penn said. Nowadays, he and Teller socialize with each other maybe twice a year.

“It’s been a very long time (that) things have been very, very good,” Penn said.

Offstage, Penn’s time is spent with his wife and two children, a 4-year-old daughter and 3-yearold son. Teller’s time is taken up with directing. Last year, he directed “Macbeth” in New York, and he’ll direct an upcoming documentary about Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer van Delft that Penn is producing. Teller also lectures to college students about the effects of magic on the brain. Both men are visiting scholars at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Although Penn and Teller have based their act on Teller’s signature silence and Penn’s penchant for putting him in perilous situations, their shows have changed over the years.

“We get weirder,” Penn said. “We get weirder because we’ve gotten better.”

Penn and Teller are scheduled to hit the stage of the Fred Kavli Theatre at the Thousand Oaks Civic Arts Plaza at 8 p.m., Fri., Nov. 6. Tickets are available at the box office or through Ticketmaster.