O.C. COMEDY / MAGIC REVIEW : Sticking to the Ruse : Penn and Teller Deliver a Familiar Set of Tricks, Some Amazing, Some Stale

The stage is set for carnage.

On one side stands Teller, the less talkative half of comedy-magic duo Penn and Teller, clad in Caltrans-style hard hat and reflector vest and cradling a fluffy white bunny rabbit.

On the other, a crunching, whirring chipper-shredder machine, still spewing cardboard shards of its most recent meal.

Since this act is known for employing stage blood by the gallon and fake mutilations to solve card tricks, you pretty much know it’s curtains for the bunny.

Still, when the fur and blood begin to fly--even though you know it’s just an illusion--chances are you’re taken aback. And when Teller walks off stage without making the rabbit reappear, it’s undeniably unsettling, even if you’re not an animal-rights activist.

The vanishing-bunny routine, one of a handful of new bits unveiled Thursday night at UC Irvine’s Bren Events Center, is quintessential Penn and Teller stuff. What other magic act would take a furry icon of the trade, seemingly mutilate it and then not make an attempt to assure audience members it was all an illusion?

“It’s just a rabbit. Toughen up!” the tall, talkative Penn Jillette advised anyone who might have flinched. Good advice. With broken-bottle juggling and a fake-blood splatter fest still ahead in the 85-minute show, this was no time to get squeamish.

Anyone who’s seen Penn and Teller in recent years, either live or on television, doubtless would have recognized much of Thursday’s show, played to a less than half-full auditorium. A majority of the routines were several years old, Penn’s carnival barker-like patter almost word for word what it was when the acts premiered.

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Some of those tricks--particularly the one in which Teller takes a knife to the shadow of a flower, causing the real article’s petals and leaves to drop off as he cuts--remain amazing.

Others are getting tired.

Sure, it’s fun to watch Teller (that’s his legal name, by the way; he dropped the “Raymond Joseph” years ago) wiggle his way out of a straitjacket while suspended by his feet over a bed of wooden spikes. And when he gets locked in a water-filled tank without an air supply for an impossibly long time, you still wonder a little bit whether he’s really OK.

But Penn and Teller’s brand of magic, stripped of the more superfluous frills of traditional illusion and even consciously endeavoring to reveal some trade secrets, suffers greatly when the element of surprise is removed.

You’re not as wrapped up in trying to figure out “how’d they do that?” so there isn’t as much allure to seeing routines more than once.

And Penn, though undeniably funny at his best, starts to grate once you’ve heard his act a few times. His patter is virtually nonstop, sometimes at speeds that would make an auctioneer wince, and occasionally sounding more forced-cerebral than a Dennis Miller joke.

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Still, there were some hilarious moments, particularly during the Gideon’s Bible routine, when three children were brought onstage to throw darts at a Bible-themed board.

Feigning a hard toss of the dart to one youngster, Penn remarked, “I’m just trying to put the fear of Jesus in you, Kevin.”

Later, when little Brittany flung a dart stage right and seemed to nail a stagehand in the foot, and then hit an off-target image of Moses in the groin (“And after all he’s been through,” quipped Penn), she was accorded little sympathy.

“I think we’ll do something condescending and pass it off as friendly,” Penn told her as he moved her closer to the board.

The big finale this time around was a “naked sleight-of-hand” routine. In less irreverent circles, this might suggest a close-up view of the magician’s bare hands.

With Penn and Teller, it meant the pair did a full-body strip behind sheets of plastic (with two “lucky” audience members as witnesses), then donned long white sleeveless jerseys and proceeded to pull everything from flowers and handkerchiefs to wine glasses seemingly from nowhere.

Penn even unleashes his massive ponytail for the bit, which ends in a “Carrie”-like bath of fake blood.

Couldn’t you just see it coming?