The Other Side of Arthur Conan Doyle

Writer Arthur Conan Doyle and illusionist Harry Houdini were close-knit friends…until they weren’t. The irony that Conan Doyle, who created Sherlock Holmes, a noted sceptic, believed in the supernatural while Houdini, whose career consisted of making people believe the unbelievable, was himself a non-believer, is noted by many; it’s what ultimately ended their friendship, as Houdini made it his pastime to debunk spiritualism while Conan Doyle spent much of his free time trying to perpetuate its belief.

The story of their friendship and its downfall is rife with dramatic possibilities and one of the people who understood that was Jerome Coopersmith (1925–2023). Coopersmith wrote innumerable screenplays for television episodes and also lots of stage plays, including that of Baker Street, a 1965 musical inspired by the Sherlock Holmes stories. In 2009, Coopersmith revisited Conan Doyle when he wrote The Other Side, a play detailing the story of the author’s relationship with Houdini.

This summer, PRO Management, an American Association Management Company (AMC) founded and run by Jeff Provost, is producing a staged reading of The Other Side. Provost has long been a fan of the play, having been a friend of Coopersmith’s for decades.

When Provost was an undergraduate at The Catholic University of America, a Washington DC-area college, he joined the University Players, the school’s professional theatrical group. They mounted Coopersmith’s play Eleanor, about Eleanor Roosevelt, in which Provost played a young Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who would go on to become the 32^nd President of the United States (and a member of the Baker Street Irregulars).

Conan Doyle and Houdini.

It was through this production that Provost and Coopersmith became friends and they corresponded throughout the rest of Coopersmith’s life. A friend of Provost’s sent him some pictures from an exhibit dedicated to the great theatre director Hal Prince, showing a display of puppets from Baker Street. The photo reminded Provost of a script Coopersmith had shown him several years prior.

“I reached out to Jerry,” Provost tells me. “And I said, ‘I’m at this point where I’d like to talk to you a bit more about this play that you wrote’[…]so, we had long discussions about it and he said, ‘Well, Jeff, I’ve got a script, but I’m struggling with it because it seems to me like it’s a screenplay. I can’t imagine how it would be staged’.”

Provost asked his friend to send him the script, which was about seventy pages long, some of which was written like a screenplay, while other pages were in a stage play format. Provost thought it would make a great theatrical production, pointing out, “I think it’s inherently dramatic when you talk about spiritualism,” and he helped Coopersmith go through the script and visualize what it would look like on the stage.

Coopersmith and his wife each passed away of COVID, but the idea of mounting a stage production of The Other Side has never left Provost’s head. He had explored the possibility of staging it at Legacy Theatre in Branford, Connecticut,  when he was the managing director there in 2023, but the production never materialised (so to speak.)

After Coopersmith passed on, Provost got to know his only surviving daughter, Dr Amy Coopersmith, a retired occupational therapist in the New York City area. “[I had] two reactions,” Dr Coopersmith tells me, speaking of receiving Provost’s call. “One, I was thrilled. And secondly, I’m not shocked; I’m not surprised, because my father’s works, many of them, are timeless, because they reflect conflicts and human interactions that are so common to all of us, no matter what age, no matter where we live. They’re basic conflict that people can relate to.”

According to Provost, the play “starts when Houdini and his wife Bess are young. Before he became an escape artist, he was a struggling magician”. The exploration of Houdini as a magician is part of what appeals to Provost, who is known as “Mr Jeffo” in magic circles.

“I’ve been doing magic since I was a kid,” he relates. “I started when I was eight or nine years old and I had a neighbour who was[…]the President of the Society of American Magicians [SAM] and his son and I were very good friends, so we played around with magic a lot as kids. Interestingly enough, [SAM] was the same society that Houdini started a hundred something years earlier! Houdini was the first President of SAM!

“Then in college, I would come back from Catholic U and would do birthday party shows all summer. But I was always interested in magic, and I was always interested in the history of magic. I’m a member of New England Magic Collectors Association and I have over a dozen vintage magic posters from that period of time, the Golden Age of Magic.”

Back to Coopersmith’s play, Provost explains that as a young magician, Houdini had trouble making ends meet. “That’s where the play starts, while he’s performing in the smaller venues with his wife.

The play’s action cuts between Coney Island, New York, where Houdini is performing, and London, England, where Conan Doyle is making a name for himself. “If [Conan Doyle] was the Stephen King of his day, Houdini was the number one entertainer in the world. So, you’re talking about ‘Tom Cruise’ and ‘Stephen King’ having a friendship!

“And that’s where the play goes. It gets into their first couple of meetings[…]and then it really gets into the topic of Spiritualism and what happens after our loved ones leave us.

“With Jerry dying right in the middle of our discussions about this play, there’s something about that that still kind of haunts me a little bit,” Provost admits.

Before any play premieres to the public, there’s plenty of rewriting that takes place, and that’s the case here, even though the original writer has passed. That idea doesn’t bother Coopersmith’s daughter.

“Jeff has reached out a few times in general,” Dr Coopersmith tells me. “But as [Jerome Coopersmith’s] daughter, I approve anything that would make it more understandable and relatable for the audience. My father was always open to that. Since I was a little girl, I went with him to rehearsals, and I saw him speak with the actors and directors to make dialogue more relatable and make it more authentic. And so, that was just part of his process, so I approve of that process!”

Provost is hoping this reading (which he is directing, as well as producing) will ultimately lead to a full production of the play in the future. The reading will take place in Chautauqua, New York in May. Chautauqua Institution, known for its summer season of theatre and other cultural events running every summer since 1874, is located near Buffalo in upstate New York, but, more germane to this subject, it is near the tiny village of Lily Dale, the top hub of Spiritualism in the United States, if not the world.

“I think this time of the year there might be a couple of hundred residents, but then it swells to thousands who come through[…]each summer because they want to connect with their loved ones who are gone. It just happens to be right there!”

If you’re in the Chautauqua area in early May, you could do worse than attend the staged reading of The Other Side. The reading, which commemorates the 100^th anniversary of Harry Houdini’s passing, will be performed on May 9 at 4pm by The Bob McClure Chautauqua Playreaders at The Marion Lawrence Room at Hurlbut Memorial (United Methodist) Church at 21 Scott Avenue, Chautauqua, NY  14722. The performance runs about 2 hours, a runtime which includes a talkback afterwards. Tickets cost $10 at the door, but you can email kschwarzwalder@gmail.com for reservations. For more information, visit https://www.friendsofchqtheater.com/.

For more on Jerome Coopersmith, check out issue 24 of Sherlock Holmes Magazine, where you’ll find Adrian Braddy’s in-depth article about Coopersmith’s musical Baker Street.