Tricksiness

His work at that time may have been earning him notoriety, but it wasn’t earning him any money, and the necessity of his tricksiness is a hard smack at the lack of societal support for the arts and artists at the beginning of their careers.

What’s delightful is how all this tricksiness is embedded in the cosily familiar conventions of vaudevillian farce.

He characterizes its convoluted narrative technique as "postmodern tricksiness".