In some ways, Joshua Jay's Six Impossible Things is an ordinary parlor magic show — inches from the audience, playing cards dance in Jay's hands, a man's wedding ring appears in an unexpected place, small red balls vanish beneath white porcelain cups.

But Jay is also doing something bigger. He's part of a new trend in magic entertainment that focuses less on grand-scale illusions (think: David Copperfield) and more on intimate experiences that leave the audience awestruck and moved. The trend makes sense. Our world of CGI and social media has made us all skeptics. A man cutting himself in half can't compete with CGI in films, for example, and it's just not as thrilling for our technology-bored brains. We may not know how a trick works, but we know it's a trick, not a mystery, and two minutes of Googling will tell us how it's done.

Over the past couple of years, though, magicians have been trying other means to keep our attention. They perform so close up that a show becomes an experience: YOU are holding the cup. YOU are choosing the card. YOUR mind is being read. They create immersive spaces that you can touch, smell, explore. Or they add Moth-like narratives to draw you in and make you feel nostalgia or hope or grief over lost chances. Jay uses all three tactics.

"Six Impossible Things" is intimate. Twenty people enter through a nondescript door in Chinatown and gather in a dim parlor with an old-fashioned, 1930s-style kitchen. A stuffed bird is in a cage in the foyer; surreal Magritte prints line the hallways. Everyone is handed (and is briefly asked to wear) a dark-colored sheet with holes cut out for eyes — think Charlie Brown ghosts. Then they walk into a white room decorated with person-sized drawings by French illustrator Serge Bloch and rows of colorful socks pinned to laundry lines, and the tricks begin. In this 70-minute show, the six "impossible things" are marquee tricks, but other tidbits are interspersed througout.

Jay is a charming storyteller and he uses his warm appeal to make each audience member feel seen. He is open about magic being a mix of sharp finger skills, misdirection and technology — and that transparency makes him even more engaging. In a way, his tricks illustrate the lessons of the stories he tells: wonder is important and perhaps life-saving; connection with others is vital; and life itself is magical in its own way.

It's not completely cohesive, but it's not theater and it's not pretending to be. A more performance-art version may have tied the stories and tricks more closely together with a single theme, and unified the look of the two performance spaces more closely. Yet it's completely enchanting.

One illusion is especially spectacular. Audience members are each handed a fork as they sit in a circle. The lights go out and between their palms, the utensils begin to bend. They curl up like one of those fortune-telling magic fish many of us played with as children, except these are metal forks. And they can't be bent with your hands.

There is, of course, an explanation. But that's not the point. Like other shows that are part of the new magic, "Six Impossible Things" provides the audience with a gasp of surprise, a moment that subverts the adult brain and results in genuine, child-like wonder. It is the reason that magic has appealed to humans for centuries. It is enough.

"Six Impossible Things," created and performed by Joshua Jay, directed by Luke Jermay. At Wildrence through July 28 with other dates in the fall.