Ricky Jay & His 52 Assistants
Ricky Jay is a particularly fascinating case because he’s built an entire show around deceit: three-card monte, crooked poker, and the many elaborate ways a card can be made to show up when a card shark wants it to. Confidence is essential to his art. When he says, for example, that he’s using an ordinary deck of cards, we must trust him. I must believe that the deck he has is not much different from the sealed deck next to my keyboard, recently purchased from Walgreen’s. It’s a naive thought, as it turns out–as the audience for an early dress rehearsal discovered when Jay somehow slipped up and had to have a different “ordinary deck” delivered to him from backstage.
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What Mamet is doing on the program, I suspect, is spreading his cloak of artistic invulnerability over Ricky Jay, inviting us to have confidence in him and his show, which had phenomenal success in New York a season ago. Significantly, when Mark Singer wrote a long feature about Ricky Jay in the New Yorker two years ago, he began with a story Mamet told him about the magician.
He does answer simpler, more practical questions. Like, can you build a show around a series of card tricks? Can you keep an audience dazzled for 90 minutes? The answer to both questions is yes, barely, but only if you have your audience’s confidence and stack the deck.
