Andrea H. Berman Photos
Dr. Faustus is famous for his deal with the devil. For ages he’s been synonymous with reaching beyond natural bounds to achieve something unprecedented, but at a great cost.
The Yale Summer Cabaret’s The Life and Death of Dr. Faustus, adapted from Christopher Marlowe’s Elizabethan play by director Andrej Visky and dramaturgs Rachel Carpman and Kee-Yoon Nahm, gives us a Faustus who is an academic rather than an alchemist. Played by Niall Powderly with self-involved intensity, he’s the kind of workaholic researcher who never had time for a life. When we meet him, as with Marlowe’s Faustus, he’s becoming fed up with his studies and is questioning his vocation. Never mind that he has Gretchen (Chalia La Tour), an able undergrad with a crush who is eager to be his graduate research assistant and bear his … field notes, the good doctor is in search of something unprecedented, c. 1990. And that means he gets to talk about multiverses and how the microcosmos and the macrocosmos might correspond.
On a set that serves as a disheveled office or lab, there are monitors aplenty. And what to Faustus’s wondering eyes should appear on them all but a commercial for a helpline that can offer him the kind of supernatural power he doesn’t even know he’s been yearning for. Coming from the monitors, Rasean Davone Johnson’s video projections are spot on and a hoot. The arrival of the three-pronged Mephistopheles, played with scene-stealing brio by Josephine Stewart, Emily Reeder, and Christopher Ross-Ewart, has both comedy and drama: they emerge amidst billowing smoke through a television frame. Together, they proceed to bedevil Faustus with the kinds of temptations that might well beguile anyone from the grind.
Visky and company’s Faustus is full of inventive solutions to the problem of the play: how to keep us engaged by the situation of a whip-smart man who has bartered away his soul for a life of thrills? The first necessary ingredient is the shifting tone of the whole. The Mephistos are eager to please but also, at times, comically inept in trying to satisfy the vacillating Faustus. Early on, a very funny date scene with one very mercurial Mephisto (Reeder) points up the problem: if you can have anyone and anything, how would you choose? And how could you possibly be satisfied with your choice? Only when Helen of Troy shows up, with amazing aura for a puppet, do we begin to see the real extent of the Mephistos’ seduction. They can’t change the past, but they can give their client a heady taste of any time and place, any legendary figure or celebrity, he might want to experience. And he’s only got 24 years — better get cracking!
The other ingredient to keep us engaged is that old standby, human interest. It’s not enough to see Faustus banter with his devils, there must be other pay-offs as well. One such is the richly satisfying comeuppance delivered to a smug rival (Ross-Ewart) who advocates practical science over the time-wasting cloudscapes of theorical research. Faustus’ victory is so complete you feel kind of sorry for Ross-Ewart’s puppetized poseur.
But even siding with Faustus against his enemies is not enough and so this Faustus, unlike Marlowe’s, keeps Gretchen in play. She offers timely interruptions that keep us apprized of how much time has passed since her last appearance. For Faustus her visits seem continuous, but years stretch between. Gretchen yokes Faustus’ flights — whether fantasized or real — to our world. As he chases the phantoms of his imagining, Gretchen gets on with her life, which is richly rewarding, successful, and personable. Everything, Faustus learns too late, his wasn’t. The scenes with Gretchen make the most of La Tour’s very believable presence and key alterations — against a world of figments and puppets and devils — but her chats with Faustus are so one-sided they only underscore, again and again, that her world and his are poles apart.
Even in Marlowe’s play, the most tragic element is the fact that, finally, time runs out for Faustus, as it will for us all. That’s the element that keeps us rooting for the kind of fulfillment before the final curtain that Goethe gave his Faust. Visky, Carpman, and Nahm stick with Marlowe, giving us a Faustus who remains a great cautionary figure. The lure of virtual life, online, is great, but web-surfing and gaming, like being a tourist throughout time, is no substitute for actually achieving something.
The Summer Cab’s Dr. Faustus is a fresh and inventive update of a classic with laughs, romance, expressive puppets, and, ultimately, a gripping turn by Powderly as a tragic figure for our times.
The Life and Death of Dr. Faustus plays at the Yale Summer Cabaret, 217 Park Street, through August 1st. Click here for times and tickets
