A few months after Adam Wilber and I started Vulpine Creations, I performed a set at a private event in Vienna. It went well by every standard I knew how to measure at the time. The reactions were strong. People clapped. A few people told me they were impressed. I drove home feeling good.
But the next morning, when I reviewed the performance in my head — as I always do, obsessively, picking apart every choice — I realized something was missing. The audience had reacted in the moment. Applause, surprise, the usual. But I had a nagging feeling that once they left the room, the experience evaporated. There was nothing for them to carry home. Nothing that would surface unexpectedly the next day while they were making coffee or sitting in traffic.
The performance had been complete. That was the problem. I had answered every question. Resolved every tension. Tied every bow. The audience left satisfied but not haunted. And I was beginning to understand that satisfaction without lingering is entertainment that does not last.
The Open Door Principle
When I first read Cara Hamilton’s approach to adapting material, one line stopped me cold. She writes that the best performances should lead the audience to questions — that the performance should open doors in their minds, not close them. The result, she argues, should leave something hanging, a question on life or the universe that the audience takes with them after you have gone.
This is the opposite of how I had been constructing routines. I was building toward resolution. Toward the clean ending where everything is explained — not the method, of course, but the emotional arc. The volunteer’s card is found. The prediction matches. The impossible thing happened and we all acknowledge it and move on. Clean. Complete. Closed.
Hamilton’s idea suggests that the closing should not be a period but a question mark. Not an open loop in the frustrating sense of an unfinished story, but an open door in the inviting sense of a thought that keeps expanding after the performance ends.
What A Question Hanging In The Air Actually Looks Like
This concept was abstract to me until I experienced it from the audience’s side. I was at a private gathering in Salzburg where a mentalist — not someone famous, just a working performer — did something I cannot stop thinking about. The specifics are not important. What matters is that at the end of the routine, instead of a dramatic reveal and a bow, the performer paused. Looked at the person who had participated. Said something quiet that I could barely hear from where I was sitting. And walked away.
No applause cue. No bow. No “thank you, you’ve been a wonderful audience.” Just a quiet sentence and a departure.
The room was buzzing afterward, not because the trick was technically superior to anything I had seen before, but because nobody was quite sure what had just happened. Not in the “how did they do that” sense — in the “what does that mean” sense. The performer had left a question in the air, and we were all still breathing it.
I drove home thinking about that performance. I thought about it the next day. I am writing about it now, months later. That is the power of the unanswered question.
Why Magicians Default to Closure
There is a good reason most magic performances end with resolution: the structure of most tricks demands it. A prediction is revealed to match. A chosen card is found. A torn item is restored. The method builds toward a climax, and the climax is inherently a moment of resolution. The impossible thing happened. Done.
This structural default is so strong that most performers — myself very much included — never question it. The trick resolves, so the performance resolves, so the audience’s experience resolves. Everything ties up neatly. And neatness feels professional.
But neatness is not the same as depth. A meal can be perfectly plated and nutritionally complete and still be forgettable. What makes a meal memorable is often one element that is unexpected, that does not quite fit, that makes you think. The same is true of performance.
I am not suggesting that tricks should not resolve. The method should absolutely deliver its climax. What I am suggesting — what I have been experimenting with — is that the narrative frame around the trick can remain open even when the trick itself closes. The card is found. The prediction matches. But the story that wrapped around those moments leaves something unresolved. A thought. An implication. A question the audience has to answer for themselves.
The Difference Between an Open Loop and an Open Door
There is an important distinction here. An open loop is frustrating. It is a story that stops before the ending, a sentence that drops before the verb. Open loops create anxiety and dissatisfaction. They feel like mistakes.
An open door is different. An open door resolves the immediate experience — the trick lands, the moment is complete — but points toward something larger. It says: what you just experienced is a small window into a bigger question. The question might be about the nature of coincidence, or the reliability of perception, or the strange relationship between choice and destiny. The question does not need to be answered. It just needs to be raised.
I have been working on the distinction in my own performances, and the key is where you place the question. If the question comes before the climax, it feels like an unresolved setup. The audience is waiting for an answer they never get. Frustrating. If the question comes after the climax — in the beat of silence that follows the impossible moment, in the final sentence of the routine — it feels like an invitation. The trick answered the small question (will the card be found?). The narrative raises the bigger question (what does it mean that it was found?).
How I Rewrote My Closing Lines
After sitting with this idea for several weeks, I rewrote the closing lines of three routines in my working set. In each case, I replaced a definitive closing statement with a reflective question or an ambiguous observation.
One routine used to end with: “And that is exactly the card you chose.” Clean. Definitive. The audience knows what happened. They applaud. I move on.
The new ending, after the reveal: a pause, a look at the volunteer, and then — softly — “The interesting question is not whether I knew. The interesting question is whether you always knew.” Then I move on.
The factual content is the same. The card was found. The trick landed. But the new ending does not close the experience. It opens it. The audience is left with a thought about foreknowledge, about choice, about whether they are as free as they think. That thought lives beyond the room. That thought follows them home.
Another routine — one I use in keynotes about innovation — used to close with a statement about how assumptions limit our vision. Solid, relevant to the corporate context, applause-worthy. I replaced it with: “I do not know if what just happened was impossible. I am not sure any of us know what that word actually means anymore.” The statement became a question. The period became an ellipsis.
The Risk of Ambiguity
This approach carries risk. Not every audience wants to be left with a question. Some audiences — particularly at certain corporate events where the schedule is tight and the energy is efficient — want resolution. They want the clean ending, the definitive statement, the clear takeaway. Leaving them with ambiguity can feel like you have not done your job.
I have learned to read the room. At high-energy corporate events where the emcee is already cueing the next segment before I finish my last sentence, I use the cleaner, more definitive closings. At intimate gatherings, after-dinner events, and keynotes where I have been given space to create atmosphere, I use the open door.
The open door also requires confidence. Definitive closings are safe. They cue applause. They signal to the audience that the performance is over and they should respond. An open door ending does not cue applause as clearly. There is a beat of silence — sometimes several beats — before the audience processes what just happened and responds. Those beats of silence can feel terrifying. They are also where the real impact lives.
What Hamilton Calls “Leading On”
Hamilton frames this as a performance that “leads on to something else.” The best routines do not end the audience’s engagement — they begin it. The performance is not the destination. The performance is the doorway. What the audience does with the experience after they walk through that doorway is where the real magic happens.
This reframing has changed how I think about success. I used to measure a performance by the reaction in the room: volume of applause, number of gasps, people approaching me afterward to say “that was amazing.” I still value those things. But I have added a new metric: did this performance give the audience something to think about tomorrow? Did it leave a question they cannot quite answer? Will they bring it up unprompted in a conversation next week?
Those are harder metrics to measure. But when someone emails me two weeks after an event and says “I’ve been thinking about what you said about choices,” I know the open door worked. The performance ended in the room. The experience did not.
The Question I Am Still Asking Myself
I do not have this figured out. I am still experimenting with how much openness an ending can sustain before it tips from invitation into frustration. I am still learning when to leave the door ajar and when to close it firmly. The balance is different for every audience, every venue, every routine.
But I keep returning to that performance I saw in Salzburg. The quiet sentence. The departure without a bow. The question that hung in the air like smoke after a candle is blown out. The room that kept buzzing long after the performer left.
I want to build performances that do that. Not performances that impress and then evaporate. Performances that linger. That leave something unresolved in the most productive sense. That send the audience home with a question they did not have when they arrived.
The best performance is not the one that answers every question. It is the one that leaves a new question hanging in the air — one the audience did not know they wanted to ask.