The peculiar partnership of Dr. Wilson and Professor Miller began two years ago over dinner in Ellsworth. An hour after meeting for the first time, the pair knew it was magic. Literally.

“It took us 45 minutes to order, because we couldn’t stop talking,” said Professor Miller. “We see totally eye to eye. We think alike.”

“People ask me, ‘Where’d you find this guy?'” said Dr. Wilson. “I say he was summoned by the magical energy.”

Miller and Wilson, aka Geoff Miller and Paul Szauter, are magicians. Not rabbit-in-a-hat, pick-a-card-any-card magicians – the duo trades in a more theatrical, imaginative brand of conjuration, divination and prestidigitation. That they lived within 30 miles of one another for years before being introduced by a mutual friend is that kind of magic you see every day: sheer chance.

Miller and Szauter will perform in Miller and Wilson’s Theater of Marvels at 7 p.m. every Saturday night in July and August at Otter Creek Hall on Mount Desert Island, in a show that’s equal parts traveling medicine show, carnival and old-fashioned magical revue. True to its name, it must be seen to be believed.

“It’s not your average children’s magic show. In many ways it’s more for adults. There are some things that make kids bite their fingernails,” said Miller, who lives in Blue Hill and works as a paramedic by day. “We are two Victorian gentlemen who have traveled the world and are bringing our knowledge to the audience. People tell us they’ve never seen a show like ours.”

Like many magicians, both Miller, 48, and Szauter, 52, started doing magic tricks as children.

“Every little boy wants to do magic, for the same reason they like fairy tales and puppetry and Dungeons and Dragons,” said Szauter. “You’re little and powerless, and there are these big, stupid people telling you what to do. So you pretend you have power.”

Szauter grew up in Ohio and studied genetics at the University of Washington, receiving his doctorate in 1980 (so yes, he’s actually a doctor). He didn’t start performing in earnest until the late 1980s. An early specialization was memory work, thanks to his almost superhuman ability to memorize things, such as an entire dictionary, or the first 5,200 digits of pi. That skill led to gigs as a psychic, performing at corporate functions and conventions.

In 2000, Szauter took a job at the Jackson Laboratory and moved with his wife to Bar Harbor. He decided then that he wanted to get out of the psychic act.

“It starts to be less fun if no one thinks it’s possible,” said Szauter. “It’s like doing horoscopes at a convention of astrologers. I wanted to do something different.”Combining his memorization talents with his flair for the dramatic, as well as his interest in the time period, Szauter created the personae of Dr. Wilson, a pitchman and snake oil salesman straight out of an 1870s traveling medicine show, complete with top hat, frock coat and the ability to talk a load of garbage.

“That time period was the golden era of the pitch,” he said. “And I thought, ‘how about I make the premise of the show be that the power to memorize things comes from this openly fraudulent elixir?'”

Dr. Wilson’s Memory Elixir, according to www.memoryelixir.com, is “a wholesome blend of natural extracts of 30 different herbs and root vegetables,” that promises to improve memory, keep you alert, and ward off “cataleptic neuroplexy”, which, if you investigate it, means nothing more than plain old sleep. Openly fraudulent, remember?

Szauter initially performed as a solo act, creating the original Theater of Marvels and doing one-off events around Mount Desert Island. Over time, he incorporated the sideshow elements, escape acts and feats of daring that he picked up from people such as professional sideshow performer Harley Newman, from whom he learned sword swallowing and fire breathing. It wasn’t until he met Miller, however, that the show really took off.

Miller grew up in Bangor, and studied theater at the University of Maine in Orono. After college, he left magic to work as a potter at Rowan Trees Pottery in Blue Hill, until a 1995 PBS special on illusions reignited his interest. After purchasing some books from legendary magic supply shop Tannin’s, and in 2001 visiting the Mecca for American magicians, the Magic Castle in Los Angeles, Miller was back in the game.

Linking up with Szauter and creating the Professor character has given Miller an outlet for his two loves: magic and theater. The summer 2007 season is the second one they’ve spent performing together.

“Professor Miller is well-traveled, erudite, eloquent. He’s a little pompous. He’s an explorer, who’s looked at everything and almost understands it,” said Miller. “I look down my nose at Dr. Wilson, who’s kind of a huckster. We’re perfect foils for each other.”

Naturally, the two magicians’ styles are very different. Szauter performs flashy, death-defying stunts such as the Path of Pain, where he walks barefoot on broken glass, and the Ladder of Swords, where as the name suggests he climbs barefoot up a ladder of swords. There’s also the Pulse Stop, a trick common to street magicians in India, wherein he literally stops his heart for a few moments.

Szauter also specializes in escape acts, just like his hero Harry Houdini. A recent addition to his repertoire is the Chrysalis, wherein Szauter is put in an iron slave collar, wrapped in chains and 5 or 6 locks, and blindfolded. He’s then covered in a captive hood and a cowl, and then wrapped in more chains. He can escape the whole thing in about five minutes.

“I watched a video of me doing it, and I thought, ‘He’s never going to get out,'” said Szauter. “And it was me, and I’d done it!”

Miller, the more soft-spoken and collected of the pair, performs classic magic tricks, using silk scarves, a deck of cards, and his specialty, the Chinese rings.

“My big signature is the rings. I’ve got it close to perfect,” said Miller. “And new to this season, I hardly speak at all during my act. It’s disappeared almost entirely from the show. It’s very subtle.”

The character-based nature of the show allows for a stronger connection between the audience and the performer: You feel like you’re in the room with two strange men, transported to the present from two centuries back.

“I always think ‘What else would this character do?'” said Szauter. “So there’s all the old carnival stuff. The flea circus, the sideshow. It’s an era and a character, and that’s a much more useful approach than picking up a catalog and buying tricks.”

“Essentially, we’re telling a story, through magic,” said Miller.

Neither Szauter nor Miller plan to get rich from magic – they do it because it’s fun.

“We actually lose money on it,” said Miller. “We always say, ‘We haven’t lost enough money yet.’ We use that to justify the next big purchase.”

The first half of the Theater of Marvels features some basic magic tricks and Miller’s performance, while the second half features the bigger stunts, as well as Szauter’s prized possession: the Feejee Mermaid, the preserved remains of a fantastic creature that has long since vanished from the oceans. The showman P.T. Barnum exhibited his mermaid in the sideshow of his legendary circus, claiming they were hunted to extinction. Szauter purchased his creature from a sale of sideshow ephemera a few years back.

“[The remains of] Feejee mermaids appeared in the West in the 1820s. A captain found it in China, and supposedly traded his ship for it,” explained Szauter. “It made its way back to America, and later P.T. Barnum got a hold of it. When I show it to people, some say, ‘It’s too bad they were hunted to extinction.’ And some love it for what it is.”

After all, the whole point of magic is to believe, even just for a moment, that the fantastic is true – whether it’s a ridiculous miracle cure-all elixir, or that with a flick of the wrist a man can pass one steel ring through another, without breaking it.

“People say, ‘It’s not real.’ Well, the memory stuff is real. The sword stuff is real,” said Szauter. “Some people think I can draw oranges out of thin air. It’s open to interpretation. It’s whatever you want to think.”

Miller and Wilson’s Theater of Marvels is held at 7 p.m. every Saturday night in July and August at Otter Creek Hall on MDI. Otter Creek Hall is located on Route 3, just a little less than 5 miles from Bar Harbor, on the right, just past Bar Harbor Brewing Co. Admission is $5. For information, visit www.theaterofmarvels.com. Emily Burnham can be reached at eburnham@bangordailynews.net.