Insight From Maven of the Mind : Stage: The mentalist, who will perform in Santa Ana, says he gets hints from body language.

What’s the last thing a reporter expects the man who bills himself as a mind reader to do during an interview?

Demystify his act.

But that’s precisely what Max Maven did recently while sipping coffee at Hamburger Hamlet and looking almost like any regular Joe: A widow’s peak, braided ponytail, goatee and two hoop earrings dangling from one ear don’t necessarily spell eccentric in the ‘90s.

“If you put any faith in IQ tests, I’m brighter than most people, fair enough,” said Maven, who opens his one-man mind-reading act at the Way Off Broadway Playhouse in Santa Ana tonight. “I would hope that I have a certain theatrical flair that makes me interesting. OK, fine. But as far as having some sort of psychic power or sixth sense? I doubt it.”

A practicing mentalist for 25 years, Maven performs live and on television, here and overseas, often in Japan (he speaks Japanese) and Europe (where he uses interpreters).

He recently starred in a 12-part series for British TV, “Something Strange,” in which, blindfolded, he selected a designated balloon from among several hovering above his TV studio audience and performed other mysterious acts. “Max Maven: Thinking in Person,” his Santa Ana show, ran for two months in 1988 at the Beverly Hills Playhouse.

The essence of what he does, he explained while chatting amiably at the restaurant near his home, involves nonverbal communication or body language.

During one performance, he said he told a stunned L.A. Reader newspaper reporter in his audience that the journalist, who wrote up the account, had within the past three years visited a remote village in Fiji, how long the vacation lasted, and what the reporter did there--with perfect accuracy. And without the reporter having uttered a word.

“I get some information from the timing of someone’s speech, how quickly or slowly they respond to the specific things I’m saying at a given moment,” Maven said. Other insights come from “watching their pupils or watching the behavior of their lips perhaps. In some cases, I might be talking to someone else about what that person’s thinking, but watching the other person react to that.”

Maven uses the analogy of musical ability to further explain it.

“Ninety-nine percent of the population has some sort of musical ability, they can carry a tune, they can remember a melody, and maybe 1% are tone deaf,” he said.

“Now imagine there are two people and one has a grade-A musical ability and one has a grade-B ability. Let’s say the person with the grade-A ability does nothing with it, but the person with the grade-B ability learns how to read music, to play instruments, to develop their vocal ability.

“After a period of time, we sit the two people down and say, ‘OK, show me your musical talent.’ Which one of them is going to come across as being the better musician? The one who worked at it, of course.

“So, when I’m asked, ‘Do you have this special talent?’ or whatever, well I think there’s a latent ability of this sort in everyone. Maybe there’s the 1% who is the equivalent of tone deaf, but we all communicate nonverbally all the time. It’s just that I’ve been exercising this stuff for years.”

Of course, Maven won’t give it all away. He won’t reveal exactly how or why he chose Fiji, for instance, from a lip curl or the way the reporter’s pupils dilated.

Nor would he fully explain the demonstration he executed for this reporter, which, he said, showed his ability to influence as well as to read people’s thinking.

After putting a rubber band around my wrist, he asked me to draw any geometrical shape on a piece of paper. I drew a triangle. When I removed the rubber band and placed it on the table, it formed a perfect triangle.

All he would say is that “somehow, through some nonverbal means I was able to influence you into drawing that shape as opposed to any other shape.”

Still, why explain so much of what he does?

Because, said Maven, “I think what’s left over is so mystifying. . . . I feel no need to make exorbitant claims, to tell you I’m in communication with entities from outer space or from 1,000 years in the past who are channeling through me, because I feel what I do is inherently fascinating.”

*

An erstwhile radio deejay, singer and actor, Maven, who won’t give his age, became fascinated with the paranormal at age 7 through playing the old maid card game.

“You’re picking cards from the person on one side of you,” he said, “and the person on the other side is picking from you. What you’re hoping is that if you have the old maid card, you get to unload it, whereas if you don’t have it, you’re hoping you don’t pluck it out of the hand of the person next to you.

“Well, I found that if the person next to me had the old maid card, I didn’t usually take it, and if I got the old maid card, I would sort of wish the person would take it from me. They didn’t always take it, but it happened enough times that I thought, ‘Wait a minute, there’s something going on here--this is better than luck.’ I was becoming aware on a gut level that people were giving me information or receiving information from me” in a nonverbal way.

Through the years, he’s made plenty of mistakes, misreading someone’s mind, for instance.

“There’s nothing in my main repertory that hasn’t gone wrong,” he said with a chuckle, “not a single thing. What do you do? You pick yourself up, you dust yourself off, and that’s it. But I like that aspect, I like the risk, it gives an edge to the performance, and it makes it genuinely exciting for me because I don’t know if everything is going to go right.

“Look, I’ve been doing this for a long time, I’m good at what I do. In any given show, it’s rare that I get much wrong. I don’t put a piece into my repertory unless my batting average is (extremely high). But none of it is guaranteed. The minute I say, ‘How about the person over here, choose this, think of that, come on stage,’ the minute that happens, all the bets are off.”

* “Max Maven: Thinking in Person” previews today and Saturday at Way Off Broadway Playhouse, 1058 E. 1st St., No. 007, Santa Ana. 8 p.m. $10. Performances continue Fridays and Saturdays through July 9. $15. (714) 547-8997.