The show begins with a message from the dead. Not a ghost, exactly, but a postcard: two words, "Boom, you!" scrawled by Harry Houdini to another magician a century ago. Playwright and performer Katie Bender found it in the Houdini archive at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, and it stopped her cold. "It was like getting a text message from the past," she told UT's College of Fine Arts. "The bombast, the cadence of it, I could hear Houdini's voice, or at least my version of his voice. It's rare that actually happens, that you get the spirit."
That postcard became Instructions for a Séance, a one-woman show that arrives at Milwaukee Repertory Theater's Herro-Franke Studio Theater on October 20, 2026, for a 6:30 p.m. performance. Bender wrote it and performs it; Lily Wolff directs. The premise is exactly what it sounds like and nothing like what you'd expect: a mother in her forties attempts to summon Houdini using instructions she found online, inviting the audience to join her in a do-it-yourself séance. Over roughly seventy minutes, with no intermission, she leads the room through rituals, games and moments of theatrical magic, all of it circling Houdini's legacy as an escape artist and his long, strange entanglement with American spiritualism.
The show's origins are as unlikely as its premise. Bender had just finished her M.F.A. in playwriting at UT when she first encountered the archive; the idea sat with her for years. It began life as a two-person piece about Houdini and his assistant, developed during a fellowship in Minneapolis. Then, at a workshop in Seattle, Bender read the script aloud and the room pushed back. The voice, they told her, belonged to her. It became a solo show.
Instructions for a Séance was first workshopped at Mohawk, a bar and music venue in East Austin, in 2019, where it was billed as "part DIY séance, part historical drag." From there it kept evolving through the Playwrights' Center, the Alley Theatre's All New Festival, Amphibian Stage in Fort Worth and, most recently, Oklahoma City Repertory Theatre. A few monologues from that original two-hander have survived untouched through every version. Much of the rest has been rewritten.
The engine of the piece is personal. In an interview with Sightlines around the 2019 Austin run, Bender described juggling graduate school and parenting while surrounded by younger writers for whom a weekend in Mexico was nothing. "I'd have these long fantasies about running away to Mexico," she said. "So in the dumbest, most obvious of ways, the images of Houdini struggling against a straight jacket strung up above a crowd resonated. I was drawn to the metaphor of escape he embodied." The show's own framing is blunter and funnier: somewhere between a DIY séance, a magic show, a comedy and a history lesson, a modern feminist artist grapples with the legacy of the world's most famous escapologist.
Houdini is a fitting ghost for the job, because he spent his afterlife being summoned. Born Erik Weisz in Budapest in 1874 and raised in Wisconsin, he died on October 31, 1926, of peritonitis from a ruptured appendix, at 52. Before his death he made a pact with his wife, Bess: if communication from the other side were possible, he would send her a coded message. He left codes with three people, Bess among them. He asked her to hold a séance every year on the anniversary of his death for ten years. She did, and by 1936, at the end of the decade, no code had come. She stopped. Houdini's brother Hardeen refused to quit, and the tradition passed through his protégé, escape artist Sid Radner, into the Official Houdini Séance, which has carried it on since. Bender's show joins a century-old line of people who have tried, and failed, to get an answer.
That failure is part of the point. The Austin Chronicle called the show "a funny... haunted exploration of ambition, legacy, and familial responsibility." Milwaukee Rep's own description promises something "hilarious, haunting, and heartbreakingly honest," fusing memoir and live magic to explore ambition, motherhood and the craving to break free, with laughter and glimpses of the extraordinary hidden in everyday life. The Fusebox listing put it more theatrically: Bender says she has been sneaking out after the kids go to sleep, into the rehearsal studio, stealing items from the prop shop and artifacts of Houdini's from the Ransom Center, trying to reach him. So far, she has failed. The audience is invited to try with her.
The Milwaukee engagement is a notable one for the Rep. Instructions for a Séance opens the company's 2026/27 season, its 73rd anniversary season and its second full year in the Associated Bank Theater Center at 108 E. Wells Street. The season announcement described the show as a continuing development project under the John (Jack) D. Lewis New Play Development Program, and it runs October 6 through November 8, 2026, in the Herro-Franke Studio Theater, the intimate space that also hosts the Rep's new three-play studio season. Tickets for the October 20 performance are $25. The Rep has also built themed evenings around the run, including a pre-show dinner pairing and a "Mom's Night Out" package that bundles food with a ticket.
The venue matters to the experience. The Herro-Franke is a studio theater, not a proscenium house, and the show is built for closeness: an audience gathered in a small room, asked to participate, watching a performer try to conjure someone who has been dead for a hundred years while also, quietly, trying to conjure a way out of her own life. It is a séance in the old sense, a group of people in a dim room hoping for a sign, and a piece of theater in a very current one, a solo performer turning her own ambivalence into a shared ritual.
Bender, for her part, has been clear that the show keeps changing because she does. "There's actually a few monologues that existed in that original play and have always stayed with me," she told UT. "They haven't been touched." But much of the show has. That is the nature of a séance, and of a life: you set the table, you light the candle, you say the words, and you see who shows up. On October 20 in Milwaukee, the invitation is open. Houdini has not answered yet. Nobody has managed it in a hundred years. The trying, Bender's show argues, is the interesting part.