A new immersive show at the Chicago Shakespeare Theater features codebreaking techniques developed at Colonel Fabyan’s Riverbank Laboratories.
David Kwong, The New York Times crossword constructor, toured the Fabyan Villa Museum in the summer of 2018 for his research for a one-man magic and puzzle show he was creating. After his tour, he spent several hours with our Fabyan Villa Museum Director for a deep dive into the history of codebreaking at Colonel Fabyan’s Riverbank Laboratories. That story, which is both fascinating and bizarre, inspired Kwong to feature it in his show.
And now his show is coming to Chicago!!!
After successful runs in New York, Los Angeles, and Washington D.C., Kwong is bringing his unique and immersive ninety-five-minute show to the Chicago Shakespeare Theater through the end of June 2024. If you have visited the Fabyan Villa Museum or even just walked through the Fabyan Forest Preserve, you will recognize many of the photos (from our archives) and puzzles in his show. Kwong encourages his audience to arrive early to the show and try to solve four puzzles before the show starts. All these pre-show puzzles feature the Fabyan estate: the bear cage, villa, Japanese Garden, and Riverbank Laboratories!
The fact that the show is being performed at the Chicago SHAKESPEARE Theater is serendipitous. The reason codebreaking developed in Geneva was that Colonel Fabyan believed Sir Francis Bacon rather than William Shakespeare wrote the Shakespearean plays. To prove it, all the Colonel had to do was break a suspected secret code that was within the manuscripts. In the mid-1910s, he hired dozens of people to find and break this code. (Spoiler alert—there is no such code). A few years into this project, the United States would need codebreakers when it became involved in World War I and Colonel Fabyan’s codebreaking team, led by Elizebeth Smith and William Friedman, were among the few in the country working on breaking codes. For about the first eight months of World War I, Riverbank Laboratories in Geneva served as codebreaking headquarters for the United States. The Smith and Friedman would get married and continue their work directly for the government. Their work was instrumental in breaking codes during World War II and the creation of the National Security Agency.
The Chicago Sun-Times wrote that “Kwong’s engaging, family-friendly show blends deep intelligence and an infectious love of language with some traditional magic tricks, such as card play, a climactic magic box and mentalism.”[1]
If you would like to see the show, click the button below for tickets!
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[1] Steven Oxman, “’Enigmatist Solves the Puzzle of Finding Something Fun to do,” Chicago Sun-Times, June 2, 2024, https://chicago.suntimes.com/theater/2024/06/02/enigmatist-review-chicago-shakespeare-theater-david-kwong.