Selbit was already an accomplished illusionist who had made several contributions to the trade. Audiences were primed for something darker, and Selbit gave it to them. Stage magic was no exception-after a war that had killed some 40 million people, watching a grown man play with silk handkerchiefs seemed hopelessly quaint. The horrors of World War I had changed the face of popular entertainment, influencing everything from Lon Chaney Sr.’s legendary makeup and prosthetic applications to Paris’s grisly Grand Guignol theater, known for its shockingly violent productions. When the trick’s creator debuted it in January 1921, he wanted the woman under the saw to be one of the country’s most famous feminist activists. In the 1980s, superstar magician David Copperfield sawed himself in half in an elaborate set piece he titled, with trademark subtlety, “The Death Saw.” But when it comes to being bisected on stage, it’s no accident that women are overwhelmingly the victims of choice. The first time the trick was performed in America by Horace Goldin, the “victim” was a hotel bellboy. It’s not just women who end up on the business end of a magician’s saw. Sorcar had actually sawn a woman in half on live TV. A version of the trick even caused a panic in 1956, when BBC viewers thought a magician known as P.C. In the decades that followed, it became one of magic’s go-to illusions. The trick was first performed a century ago, at London’s Finsbury Park Empire theater, by a British magician whose stage name was P.T. When you think of mainstream stage magic, odds are good that one iconic illusion comes to mind: the act of sawing a woman in half. When the sawdust settled, he opened the box and cut the ropes. Then the real work began: He used a large saw to laboriously split the box into two halves. The man sealed the container, which was supported on a pair of wooden platforms, and shoved panes of glass and sheets of metal through pre-cut slits and, seemingly, through the woman's body. A man had tied her up at the wrists and ankles, fed the ropes through holes at either end of the coffin-like structure, and tied them again outside the box, making movement-let alone escape-seem impossible. It started 100 years ago, with a woman in a box.
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