Praise for the Confidence Man:
Paul Cohen’s gratifyingly ambitious script manifests itself less as a single play than an impressively cohesive piece of installation art about swindling, literally buoyed by the verisimilitude of its maritime setting….
With only beer sales… to keep the good ship Woodshed Collective afloat, it’s a wonder this tiny company is able to mount such a huge entertainment. And it’s heartening that they’ve pulled it off.
Five Stars:
Woodshed Collective proves itself up to old tricks in its marvelously intricate and involving new show. The sheer ambition of the project is impressive in and of itself: Set aboard the Lilac Steamship at Pier 40, The Confidence Man comprises at least a dozen of stories about charlatans and mountebanks, some of them adapted from Herman Melville’s novel of the same name. These tales, organized into three discrete tracks, are enacted simultaneously in 25 different playing areas for groups of spectators, who are escorted around the ship by six docents but free to wander as they please. On a technical level, it’s a breathtaking stunt.
But The Confidence Man is much better than it needs to be for gimmickry’s sake alone. Paul Cohen’s script—which, when all the tracks are included, is some 330 pages long—bulges splendidly with clever frills and fillips, and touches on interesting questions of knowledge and faith.
On an old steam-propelled, decommissioned U.S. Coast Guard vessel docked at Pier 40 on the Hudson, 2009’s most exhilarating theatrical achievement (thus far) can still be experienced, and it doesn’t cost a dime….
During the three years I’ve been covering theater for Gothamist, I’m quite confident I’ve never deployed the oft-overused word “genius” to describe a production. So then perhaps you’ll trust me when I tell you The Confidence Man is most definitely a work of dazzling genius, a spellbinding feat of collective creativity.
So it’s a bunch of crazy stories about cons and suckers? Yes, but the play is really about humanity’s essential and irrepressible need to believe in things. It’s about heartbreakingly beautiful ideas like the blindness of love, religious faith without question, and the need to give the common man the benefit of the doubt. On the cynical side, it’s all ripe fodder for cons and the audience gets to be in on the joke. So you can laugh when your docent tells you how she personally rescued all the furniture in the room from the Titanic. You can root for characters falling in love, even though you know one of them is lying. And you can gleefully climb up and down rickety ladders on the ship because you want to see what happens next, even though you know it’s not real. Because at the end of the day, in theatre and in life, we come together in our need to believe.
