The mentalism routine that eventually became one of my strongest stage pieces started its life at a restaurant table in Linz. Not on a stage. Not even at a large event. At a table for four, during a walk-around set, where I tried a new premise on a couple and their friends over dessert.
The premise worked. The scripting was rough, the timing was off, and the ending needed restructuring, but the core idea — the thing the spectator experienced, the emotional arc of the piece — landed. I could see it in their faces. I could hear it in the quality of their silence.
Over the next three months, I performed that piece at close-up tables more than fifty times. I rewrote the script four times. I adjusted the pacing. I found the natural pause points. I discovered which words amplified the experience and which words were dead weight. By the time I performed it on stage for the first time, at a corporate event in Vienna, the piece was structurally sound, the scripting was tight, and the only adjustments I needed to make were physical — the stage-specific adaptations I wrote about in the previous post.
That piece would not have been ready for stage if I had not tested it at close-up first. And the close-up testing taught me things that stage performance alone never would have.
The Testing Ground Nobody Thinks About
There is a tendency among performers who are moving toward stage work to mentally separate their close-up gigs from their stage ambitions. Close-up is the day job. Stage is the goal. The two exist in different mental compartments, and the material developed for one is assumed to be irrelevant to the other.
John Graham challenges this assumption directly in Stage By Stage. He writes that you can try new stage material in close-up settings first, to work out lines, timing, and audience understanding. He argues that performing familiar material for larger audiences gives you confidence because you already know every line and moment. The idea is simple: use your close-up opportunities as a development laboratory for your stage material.
When I first absorbed this idea, it felt like a cheat. How can you test stage material at a close-up table? The contexts are so different. The audience size is different. The physical relationship is different. The energy is different.
But Graham is not talking about testing the physical staging. He is talking about testing the story. The script. The premise. The emotional arc. The audience’s understanding of what is happening and why it matters. These elements are portable across contexts in a way that physical staging is not. And they are, in most cases, the elements that determine whether a piece succeeds or fails on stage.
What Close-Up Testing Reveals
When you test a stage routine at a close-up table, you get access to a quality of feedback that is impossible to obtain in a stage setting. Here is why.
At close-up, you are two feet from the spectator’s face. You can see micro-expressions. You can see the moment of confusion that lasts half a second before they re-engage. You can see the subtle shift from interest to boredom, or from passive watching to active engagement. You can hear their breathing change. You can feel the energy of the interaction at a granularity that is simply unavailable from a stage.
This granularity of feedback is extraordinarily valuable for developing material. When a line does not land at close-up, you know immediately. You see the blank face. You feel the micro-pause in the conversation. You know exactly which word failed, because at two feet, you can almost track their comprehension in real time.
On stage, by contrast, your feedback is coarse. You can tell whether a moment got a laugh or not. You can tell whether the audience applauded or not. You can sense the general energy level. But you cannot track individual comprehension. You cannot see micro-expressions from twenty meters away. You cannot identify the exact word or phrase that caused a moment to soften.
This means that close-up testing gives you a higher-resolution diagnostic tool for your material. You can identify problems earlier, with more precision, and fix them faster. By the time you take the piece to stage, the material has already survived a gauntlet of intimate scrutiny that would have taken months to achieve through stage performances alone.
The Four Things Close-Up Testing Teaches You
Through my own process of developing stage material at close-up tables, I have identified four specific things that the close-up setting teaches you better than any other context.
The first is premise clarity. Does the audience understand what is happening and what the stakes are? At close-up, you can see the moment of understanding in their eyes — or the moment of confusion. If your premise requires explanation, if the spectator needs a second pass at understanding the setup, if there is any ambiguity about what they are supposed to be paying attention to, close-up reveals it instantly.
At a corporate dinner in Salzburg, I was testing a prediction routine that involved a chain of seemingly unrelated decisions. At the close-up table, I watched a spectator’s brow furrow during the second decision. She did not understand how it connected to the first. She was still engaged, but she was confused, and the confusion was eroding the building tension that the piece required. I restructured the connecting language that evening and tested it again the next night. The furrowed brow disappeared. The tension held.
That restructuring would have taken much longer to identify in a stage setting, where I would have only known that “something felt soft in the middle section” without being able to pinpoint the exact cause.
The second thing close-up testing teaches you is scripting rhythm. Every script has a rhythm — a pattern of tension and release, of setup and payoff, of words that speed up and words that slow down. At close-up, you can feel this rhythm in the spectator’s body language. When the rhythm is right, they lean in. When the rhythm falters, they shift. When a pause is too long, you see impatience. When a pause is too short, you see them still processing when you have already moved on.
I developed the scripting rhythm for my stage show almost entirely at close-up tables. I would perform the same piece night after night, varying the pauses, the emphasis, the speed of specific sections, and I would watch the spectator’s physical responses. Over dozens of repetitions, I found the rhythm that worked — the specific pattern of delivery that kept people engaged from the opening line to the final reveal.
The third thing close-up testing teaches you is audience interaction design. If your stage piece involves a volunteer — and most mentalism pieces do — close-up is where you learn how to guide that interaction. What questions produce interesting responses? What instructions confuse people? What physical actions feel natural for a spectator and which ones feel awkward or forced?
At close-up, you learn these things through direct experience with hundreds of different people. Each spectator responds slightly differently. Some need more time to process instructions. Some freeze when given an open-ended choice. Some are natural performers who will amplify anything you give them. Through this cumulative experience, you develop an instinct for how to design the volunteer interaction so that it works for the widest possible range of personalities.
The fourth thing close-up testing teaches you is emotional calibration. How big does this moment need to feel? How much dramatic weight can a particular reveal support? Where is the line between effective suspense and uncomfortable tension?
These calibration questions are almost impossible to answer in the abstract. They need to be tested with real people. And close-up, where you can see the emotional response in exquisite detail, is the ideal calibration environment. I discovered that one particular piece in my repertoire was creating too much tension before the reveal — spectators were becoming anxious rather than intrigued. At close-up, I could see this happening in real time and adjust the tone of my voice, the warmth of my smile, the reassuring quality of my words. By the time I took the piece to stage, I knew exactly how to modulate the emotional temperature at every point.
What Close-Up Testing Cannot Teach You
Honesty requires me to acknowledge the limitations. Close-up testing is extraordinarily valuable, but it is not a complete substitute for stage experience.
Close-up testing cannot teach you about visibility at distance. A prop that is perfectly legible at two feet may be invisible at twenty meters. The only way to know this is to get on a stage and look out at an audience.
Close-up testing cannot teach you about energy projection. The energy level that feels right at a dinner table is far too low for a stage. You need live stage experience to calibrate your projection — vocal, physical, and emotional — for a larger space.
Close-up testing cannot teach you about crowd dynamics. A table of four responds as four individuals. A room of two hundred responds as a collective organism with its own energy, its own momentum, its own tipping points. The psychology of a crowd is different from the psychology of a small group, and you can only learn to read and manage that psychology by performing for crowds.
Close-up testing cannot teach you about technical staging — where to stand, how to move, how to use the stage space, how to position a volunteer so the whole room can see their face. These are physical skills that require a physical stage.
But here is the crucial point: the things that close-up testing cannot teach you are mostly physical and logistical. The things it can teach you — premise, scripting, interaction, emotional calibration — are the things that determine whether a piece is any good in the first place. You can learn to project your voice and position a volunteer in a matter of weeks. Developing a premise that works and a script that breathes takes months. Close-up testing lets you do the months of work before you ever need the weeks.
The Two-Track Development Process
What I eventually settled into was a two-track development process for my stage material, and it has served me well through every piece I have developed since.
Track one is close-up testing. When I have an idea for a new stage piece, I start by testing the core premise and script at close-up tables. I do not worry about staging. I do not worry about visibility. I focus entirely on whether the story works, whether the interaction is smooth, whether the emotional arc lands. I perform the piece at close-up tables until the script is tight, the premise is clear, and the audience response is consistently strong.
Track two is stage adaptation. Once the piece has survived close-up testing, I begin the physical adaptation work. I raise the working height. I adjust for visibility. I modify the volunteer choreography for stage positioning. I calibrate the energy and projection for a larger space. I test the adapted version at progressively larger events — first a big table, then a small stage, then a full theater or ballroom setting.
The two tracks are not sequential in a rigid sense. I often go back to close-up testing after a stage performance has revealed a scripting problem or an interaction weakness. The two settings complement each other. Close-up gives me precision. Stage gives me scale. And the material benefits from both.
The Courage to Be Bad at Close-Up
There is one psychological barrier to this approach that I want to address, because it almost stopped me from adopting it.
When you test stage material at a close-up table, the material is rough. It is unfinished. The script is not locked. The handling may be uncertain. The moments may not land. And because you are at close-up — where the audience is two feet away and can see everything — the roughness is maximally exposed.
This feels terrible. After years of performing polished close-up material that reliably gets strong reactions, performing rough material feels like stepping backward. It feels like losing competence. There is a voice in your head that says, “You know how to kill at this table. Why are you performing something mediocre when you could be performing something great?”
The answer is that the mediocre new piece is an investment in something that does not exist yet. The polished old piece is a repeat of something you have already achieved. And if you only ever perform what you have already perfected, you will never develop anything new.
I had to give myself permission to be bad at close-up tables in the service of developing stage material. I had to accept that some tables would get a weaker experience because I was testing rather than performing. I had to redefine those close-up sets not as performances but as rehearsals with a live audience — which, in fact, is exactly what they were.
Graham writes that one performance in front of any audience is worth fifty rehearsals alone in your room. He is right. And close-up tables are performances in front of audiences. They count. The feedback is real, the learning is real, and the development is real. The only thing that is different is the context in which that feedback will ultimately be used.
The Bridge
The close-up table is a bridge. Not a lesser form of performance, not a step down from stage work, but a bridge between the private rehearsal room and the public stage. It is a place where you can test ideas with real people at minimal risk, gather high-resolution feedback, and refine your material with a precision that stage performance alone cannot provide.
If you are developing stage material, do not wait for a stage. Go to a close-up table. Test the story. Test the script. Test the interaction. Let four people at arm’s length tell you everything that two hundred people at twenty meters will eventually confirm.
The close-up table is not the destination. But it is, quite often, the best place to start.