Charismatic Con Men in Theater
The convincing huckster archetype is a common thread through several Lantern productions
“And I suppose the other extreme was ‘Am I a conman?’ — which of course was nonsense, I think.”
This question of authenticity vs. trickery eats at Frank Hardy, the title character of Brian Friel’s Faith Healer, onstage at Lantern Theater Company February 1 through March 3, 2024. Frank is part of a long line of charismatic figures in drama who lead, persuade, and even fool the other characters onstage — and it’s a figure that the Lantern has a lot of experience with.
From The Music Man’s Harold Hill to Catch Me If You Can’s Frank Abagnale, the charismatic con artist is an enduring figure in all kinds of narratives. Novels, movies, books, and musicals have all featured this enduring archetype — and the same con artist’s story occasionally appears across multiple mediums. Whether the charmer is heisting from a villainous casino owner as in Ocean’s Eleven or grasping for a more charmed life like Tom Ripley, we love stories about people getting one over on someone else. Scammers are even a popular true-crime topic, with some of the most sensational stories like Elizabeth Holmes or Anna Delvey being turned into popular entertainment alongside their fictional counterparts. But there’s something extra special about reckoning with the story of the con artist in live theater.
Faith Healer’s Frank Hardy is an atypical entry into the genre. This maddening, unreliable man does indeed seem to be possessed of a gift of some kind, but it also seems not to be under his control — which doesn’t stop him from traveling the Scottish and Welsh back country promising cures he doesn’t know he can deliver. A true con man knows the game and plays his role; Frank’s concern about being a mountebank eats him alive. But at the same time, his charisma and the promise of occasional transcendence keeps him on the road, binds his partner and manager to him, and beckons the handfuls of people desperate to place their trust in someone who might not deserve it.
While he never appeared onstage, this complicated figure — part true believer, part charlatan — was also a palpable presence in this season’s previous production, Crumbs from the Table of Joy by Lynn Nottage. Father Divine, preacher and leader of the International Peace Mission, inspired true devotion and performed tangible good deeds during his heyday in the 1930s and 40s. He also claimed to be god on earth and convinced his followers to renounce their personal belongings and wealth to him. In Nottage’s play, this complicated and charismatic man brings Godfrey Crump under his sway without ever appearing in person.
Sometimes, though, it is not complicated at all: in Molière’s Tartuffe, which launched the Lantern’s 30th anniversary season this past September, the charismatic titular character successfully cons just one person. The comedy of this classic play bursts not from our own attraction to the con man, but from the dissonance of watching someone we know to be a liar so fully ensnare Orgon when the rest of his family can see right through the hypocritical holy man. There is delicious fun to be had in watching Tartuffe play his benefactor — and only his benefactor — like a fiddle.
Charisma isn’t always inborn in these figures, though, and it isn’t always charming to watch. The title character in Bertolt Brecht’s The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui — which opened the Lantern’s 2019/20 season — begins as a petty gangster who learns charisma in service of his brutality. Charisma becomes a blunt-force weapon in Arturo Ui’s hands, employed just enough to beat into submission those he has not literally beaten — or worse — on his rise to societal and political domination. Brecht’s parable about how easily fascism can rise when fear and charisma work hand in hand, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui asks how quickly we can be conned out of our most basic rights and decency by a good set of words, smoothly delivered.
Where Arturo Ui, Tartuffe, and even Frank Hardy can be seen as preying on people who don’t deserve to be hoodwinked, there is also the brand of charismatic con man who fool a worthy victim. In Bruce Graham’s The Craftsman, which had its world premiere at the Lantern in 2017, Han van Meegeren primarily targets pompous art critics and Nazis like Hermann Göring, convincing them that his own paintings are actually lost masterpieces by Vermeer. Han van Meegeren is often cruel and rarely charming, but he draws us and his marks in nevertheless with the charisma of competence. When his deception is revealed, we can root for his triumph over those who have done and would do great damage, even as we remain ambivalent about the man himself.
Whether we ourselves are conned by these onstage figures or get to sit outside the ruse and watch it play out on unsuspecting marks, there is an undeniable electricity in watching onstage stories of con artists. After all, by sitting together in a darkened theater, aren’t we all agreeing to be conned a little? We hope the trick will be benevolent; we hope to be changed by it. But to reach that place of transformation, we agree to be tricked by skilled and charismatic craftspeople. Perhaps that is why we enjoy watching these stories: for the pleasure of seeing an artist at work on us and on the other characters all at once, conning us together. More than most, Faith Healer reckons with this artistic double-act most thoroughly: what does it mean to call to a gift that we cannot control? What does it mean to present ourselves as one thing when we know ourselves to be another? And what must we convince others of in the pursuit of our own meaning?
More great reading: See other recent articles and interviews on the Lantern Searchlight blog
Lantern Theater Company’s production of Faith Healer by Brian Friel is onstage February 1 through March 3, 2024, at St. Stephen’s Theater. Visit our website for tickets and information.
