Faust Clones, Part 3

[This is the last installment of “Faust Clones,” my three-part examination of seven plays adapted from the Faust story which was first recorded in the late 16th century and lives on in the 21st.  (ROTters are encouraged to go back to Part 1 on 15 January to familiarize themselves with the background of the legend and its origins.)  In Part 3, I’ll look at the last two plays I selected for this article, Leonardo Shapiro’s unproduced radio play from 1993, Nothing Is Ever Lost, or All in Good Fun, and the most experimental and, arguably, farthest from the Renaissance roots of the story, John Jesurun’s FAUST/How I Rose from 1996 and 2004, sneaking us over the line into the 21st century.]

Theater director, writer, and production designer Leonardo Shapiro’s concern for ecology and the environment, and especially his focus on nuclear pollution, are openly reflected in Nothing Is Ever Lost, or All in Good Fun: Radioromance, as are several of his philosophic interests.  Written in New Mexico in December 1993, Nothing Is Ever Lost is based on Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus.

Leonardo Shapiro (1946-97) was the founder and artistic director of The Shaliko Company (1972-92), an experimental theater group based in New York City’s East Village.  As a prep school student in Lenox, Massachusetts, Shapiro hitchhiked to New York City frequently where he met and hung out with the seminal avant-garde theater group, the Living Theatre.  Already politically active (his first arrest was at 13) and a devotee of Bertolt Brecht, Shapiro learned from the Living’s example that theater and politics could go together and he made politically active stage works from his start in the field.  He was a student at New York University’s School of the Arts (1966-69) where he studied with, among others, Jerzy Grotowski; while a student at SOA, Shapiro staged the anti-war street musical Brother, You’re Next and formed the New York Free Theater (1968-69), a street troupe that protested racism and violence, with some of his classmates.  After graduating with a BFA in directing, Shapiro lived near Taos, New Mexico, where he formed the Appleseed Circus (1969-71), a guerilla theater group which roamed the Four Corners mounting protest performances for environmentalism, against nuclear weapons, and calling attention to other liberal, leftist, and radical causes.  Returning to New York City, he established Shaliko, a troupe dedicated to presenting politically and socially aware performances and applying the theories of Brecht and Grotowski.  He served as an artist-in-residence at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, and then became director of the Trinity/La MaMa Performing Arts Program (1986-92), administered by Trinity but based at the famous East Village Off-Off-Broadway theater.  When he retired from New York theater in 1992, Shapiro moved back to the Taos area and, continuing his theater work and his activism, he took to writing plays and poetry and a theater-based novel.  Written in 1993, Nothing Is Ever Lost came out of that period of Shapiro’s life.  Sadly, he was diagnosed with inoperable bladder cancer in 1995 and died in 1997 at the age of 51.

The play begins in radio station KAOS, an NPR outlet, where the Hermetic Mystery Theater of the Air is broadcasting Marlowe’s Tragical History of Doctor Faustus (which Shapiro’s Shaliko Company produced in 1988; see the discussion in Part 1 of “Faust Clones”).  Johanna Gretchen Kepler reads The Chorus opening until Roger Radio interrupts the performance with a news bulletin from “Washing Done” (that’s the kind of sarcasm with which Shapiro leavens his script) about an incident at the Waste Isolation Pilot Program for Memory Eradication (WIPP-ME) on the Navajo Reservation in Arizona.  Roger turns the broadcast over to Tom-Tom (Coyote) Rainwater on the scene.  Tom-Tom reports that a truck caravan with 600 tons of radioactive waste en route to the WIPP-ME disposal site under the reservation has been lost for two days.  While the station returns to the Doctor Faustus broadcast from time to time, it’s constantly interrupted by bulletins with direr and direr announcements and conflicting government party-line assurances and double-talk from various agencies.  Marlowe’s text begins to disintegrate into a mix of contemporary references as Faustus sends greetings to “the Germans Karl [Jung is my guess—although he’s actually Carl—but he could mean Marx] and Sigmund [Freud]” and the play  morphs into a search for the missing radioactive waste shipment from the Los Alamos Nuclear Weapons Complex (whose “artistic director” is Jim Jones). 

Eventually, Johanna recruits Henry Faustus from the radio drama to help find the nuclear waste.  (Heinrich is Goethe’s name for his Faust; Marlowe’s Faustus is John.)  Faustus, who takes on the persona of the Lone Ranger, partners with Tonto, a send-up of the 1950s stereotype of a Hollywood Indian right down to his pidgin English.  (Later in the play, Tonto remarks, in perfectly good English: “Maybe we can escape the stereotypes that trap us as well.”)  The two ride off on a pair of . . . cats; Tonto’s feline steed is named Albert while Faustus’ cat is, appropriately, named Silver.  Suddenly, the signal from the station is interrupted and a group called Revolting Artists breaks into the studio and claims responsibility for the missing nuclear waste.  For the return of the radioactive material, they demand “to take over the NEA and turn it into a real endowment for real artists, namely us” and that “all art-work [be] protected by copyright forever” so that all the royalties can be invested in “working artists.”  The artists’ complaint is that “the yahoos”—that is, the establishment—have “separated art from life, artists from public, form from content, and both from context.”  (These are all claims Shapiro made—and wrote about—during his entire career.  In fact, the whole Revolting Artists’ speech could be a capsulization of Shapiro’s lifelong political and social positions.)  As Johanna denies they are the hijackers, the artists are beaten and carried out of the studio.

Meanwhile, Faustus and Tonto ride to the last place the nuclear-waste convoy was seen, the Silver Dollar Trading Post and Lounge on another Navajo “Res” (as Tom-Tom calls them) in Good Luck, Utah.  (“Look like IHOP in Hell,” observes Tonto.)  Tonto performs a magic trick with a rattlesnake—which sufficiently terrifies the bar customers that they answer the seekers’ questions.  Tom-Tom reports strange phenomena occurring all around: “border crossings of all kinds,” “U.F.O. sightings,” “freak electrical storms.”  There are also reports of “mounted bands of Native Americans raiding frontier settlements.” 

The reporter interviews Old Dry Wind, the “senior representative” of the Traditional People who explains that “men from your government” came to buy a cave on Indian land for a waste dump, but the Diné (People) always refused because the land is holy; it is their sipapu, or place of emergence.  Then the government made a secret deal with a “chief called Lawyer . . . a great talker, but not an honest man,” who tricked the People.  The Ancient Elder begs listeners not to “allow anything to happen to” the sipapu—if it’s blocked by anything going into the cave, “Horrible things will happen.” 

Back at KAOS, Johanna takes a phone call from Russ Perdudu who offers to trade “this convoy of trucks I found wandering around the dessert” for “this here radio network.”  It seems his corporation, Perot/Time/Chrysler Spectacular Systems, needs a radio network to complete his conglomerate of Random House books, Warner Brothers movies, and Arts and Leisure Cable Network in order corner the media market and monopolize any story.  Perdudu even proposes that his Mattel branch “whip up a terrific Mini-Convoy,” the deluxe set of which will come “with real nuclear waste!  To transport and bury on your own site at home.”  He adds excitedly, “God Bless America!  We’ll sell the shit back to them . . . .”  Told he’s on the air, Perdudu launches into a racist, anti-Semitic, nationalistic, anit-communist, anti-government rant—complete with slurs.  Johanna exclaims at the “transforming power of the media” to “retribalize mankind” and despairs of “the ignoring of this power” because people’s consciousness has become numbed.

On the trail of the nuclear convoy, Faustus has used his “alchemical herbalist studies” to track down some “organic matter” he and Tonto obtained back at the Silver Dollar.  Faustus says it’s “a mushroom,” so he calls on his late friend John Cage, who’s staying at “the Chelsea” and is something of a mycologist (studier of fungi, don’t you know).  Cage, whose dialogue includes a quotation from the composer that Shapiro used prominently in Shaliko promotional materials, explains that the substance isn’t a mushroom at all, but peyote, which evokes “visions, changes in perception, time sense, and mood.”  This sends Faustus and Tonto off on a vision quest for the practitioners of the Indian peyote religion.  At the same time, back at KAOS, Tom-Tom is interviewing “an unnamed senior scientist” at Los Alamos called Deep Throat who reveals that the missing convoy isn’t carrying radioactive waste, but actual bombs that the lab was supposed to have dismantled in compliance with various treaties and acts of Congress—but didn’t to save time and money.  (The scientists also figured the bombs could be reassembled should “geo-political circumstances change,” rationalized Deep Throat, or—just to give you an indication of Shapiro’s basic politics—“the Republicans get back in the White House”—which, of course, they did three years after Shapiro’s death.) 

I’ve mentioned several times that topics or phrases Shapiro used in the script of Nothing Is Ever Lost were concerns and interests of his often since the start of his political activism in his teens.  While nearly all of Shapiro’s productions had strong politically and socially critical aspects—if the script wasn’t already politically aware, Shapiro staged it so that social and political criticism was at least a subtext—he seldom included such blatant personal concerns and interests in his work before returning to New Mexico.  Among the references in Nothing Is Ever Lost that draw on Shapiro’s personal philosophy and politics, for instance, is the “Los Alamos National Weapons Complex,” Shapiro’s fictionalized name for the Los Alamos National Laboratory, the famous nuclear facility where the playwright led a two-day environmental-theater protest on 5 and 6 August 1970 (the 25th anniversary of the Hiroshima atomic bombing).  It was the first-ever such demonstration at the lab (see my post, “Song in the Blood (Hiroshima/Los Alamos),” 5 August 2009).  The Revolting Artists’ call for the National Endowment for the Arts to be transformed into “a real endowment for real artists” and their demand that art works generate permanent royalties to support working artists are actual positions the playwright staked out, most vociferously during the uproar over the defunding of the so-called NEA Four, some of whom were friends and colleagues of Shapiro’s.  His argument that grant evaluators and critics have divorced artistic form, which may be judged, from content, which may not, goes back to the earliest days of his professional career as well.  Shapiro’s invocation of “U.F.O. sightings” was a topic he actually used in a play, Strangers, workshopped in 1990 (see my post, “Shaliko’s Strangers,” 3 and 6 March 2014).

As the search proceeds, Shapiro’s text becomes more diffuse, airier, less concrete.  Dialogue gives way more and more to monologues and speeches, sometimes adapted from Marlowe or other sources like Indian prayers or politico-philosophical treatises, such as one delivered by French Woman, identified as a Situationist, a proponent of a French post-World War II art and political movement by which Shapiro had been influenced.  In a soliloquy by Lullaby, Shapiro references ideas from Shiva Naipaul’s Journey to Nowhere, an examination of the People’s Temple debacle of the Reverend Jim Jones (which was one of the inspirations for Strangers, the story line for which was based on a radiation contamination in Goiania, Brazil, in 1987).  Lullaby declares, “You have learned to be blind, you have learned to be deaf,” an echo, perhaps, of Tennessee Williams’s indictment of society’s intentional (or, perhaps, inattentional) blindness in Glass Menagerie.  (Williams was another of Shapiro’s acknowledged influences.)  Later, Faustus echoes the same notion in this thoughts.  The landscape becomes increasingly threatening and ominous, littered with radioactive animal corpses and the detritus of civilization.  Faustus and Johanna (Gretchen) fall in love—and Tonto begins to behave less like the faithful Indian companion of TV’s Lone Ranger and more like Faustus’ Mephistophilis, leading Faustus to a secret destination.  They arrive at the Holy Mountain of the South, one of the four sacred mountains of the Navajo epistemology that demark Dinétah, the traditional homeland of the Diné (see my article on the Navajo healing rite, “‘My Mind Restore For Me’: Navajo Healing Ceremonies,” 15 May 2013), as Tonto leads Faustus down a thousand feet beneath the Earth’s surface. 

The searchers slide even deeper through an ice tube into a cavern Faustus compares to Plato’s Cave in reverse.  “No,” replies Tonto, “it’s Plato who got it backwards. . . .  It’s not ideas that are real, it’s the world itself.”  Gretchen arrives, borne by Silver, but she can’t stay.  Tonto reveals that they are at the sipapu—and the convoy trucks are there, too.  They’d been hidden there all along, not hijacked but made invisible to detection systems.  Tonto and the Indians that have survived despite the Euro-Americans’ efforts to “poison us with your silly scientism and repression” plan to use “the sacred filth in the trucks” to effect their disappearance from the Earth into the Fifth World, leaving the white man “here in the mess you have made.”  (This is a sort of reverse effect of the 19th-century Plains Indian Ghost Dance religion that envisioned the supernatural removal of the white man and his civilization, leaving the Native Americans in the natural paradise they imagined preceded the arrival of the Europeans.)  Tonto and his cohorts have “called a healing ceremony” to open the portal.  (In traditional Navajo creation mythology, the Fifth World is the present existence of humans, but Shapiro has extended his dramatic epistemology to make this our Fourth World, with which the Diné were dissatisfied, and posited a new, Fifth World of renewal and happiness.)

As Johanna describes the scene unfolding in the distance, we envision a sort of gigantic healing ceremony, with masses of people, including Anglos and Buddhists, dancing along with the trucks while “a picture [is] drawn in the sand, . . . a giant tapestry pattern with some kind of colored stuff”—a huge sand painting, an integral part of the Navajo healing rite.  The mountains open up and absorb the trucks as Faustus and Tonto emerge and chant a variation of the Nightway song.  Faustus tells Johanna that he must go with Tonto and the others (“I made a deal”) “to be their Canary.”  (Shapiro likened artists to the canary in the coal mine; also, in the Navajo legend, several animals go into the Fifth World in advance of the Diné to scout ahead and bring back word.) 

As Johanna describes the mountains themselves rising up into the heavens, she reverts to her role as radio announcer, dedicating the performance of Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus to “Orson the Magnificent” (Orson Welles was one of Shapiro’s acknowledged inspirations, and this radio play was clearly modeled to an extent on Welles’s famous Halloween broadcast in 1938 of The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells.) As you’ve no doubt noticed, Shapiro isn’t above some low humor and silliness, and Johanna announces that the next presentation on KAOS will be Wuthering Heights, adapted by David Rammit, AKA David Mamet. 

Native American culture, philosophy, and spiritual beliefs were extremely important to and influential on Shapiro’s life and work from his earliest years.  After all, he named his New York company Shaliko after the Zuni messenger spirits between the gods and man, the Shalakos, and it’s part of what drew him back to New Mexico to retire.  The Nightway healing chant of the Navajos, which Shapiro viewed as a model for theater as a “healing art,” upon which he also modeled his concluding poem, “In Tsegihi,” in Nothing Is Ever Lost is a prime example.  (Tsegihi is a place sacred to the Navajo where a shaman was taught the Nightway chant by one of the Yeibechi and brought it back to the Diné.)  Also significant are the references to the Diné, the Navajo name for themselves (“the People”); the subjugation and manipulation of Native Americans and the suppression or appropriation of their culture; the sipapu, “the place of emergence” in the lore of many Indian peoples (including, particularly, the Taos Pueblos whose sipapu is Blue Lake in the sacred Sangre de Cristo Mountains near Shapiro’s Taos County home); peyote, a hallucinogenic used in Native American religious rites (and which Shapiro used in New Mexico during his earlier sojourn); and the Yei Be Che Mountains, an allusion to Yeibichai (or Yeibechi), a spirit in the Navajo religion; all are taken from elements of the playwright’s personal philosophy.  Shapiro also believed, as he laments in Nothing Is Ever Lost, that western science and technology, though he wasn’t a Luddite, had so separated us from the natural world that we had lost our spirituality.  Even the invocation of “mounted bands of Native Americans raiding frontier settlements” comes from Shapiro’s childhood imagination when he dreamed of himself as an eight-year-old boy who “danced, carried a tomahawk to school, scalped the principal, took back the country, drove out the white man, restored the buffalo, and lived happily ever after”—a boy’s vision of the Ghost Dance ceremony.

The tomahawk dream of 8-year-old Richard Leo Shapiro was one of the tactics the isolated little boy, among the minority whites in a Cuban-majority public school system in Miami and then one of only two Jews at the Admiral Farragut Academy military school he attended in St. Petersburg, Florida, found to gain control of his hostile world, at least in his imagination.  Magic tricks, which a young Leo Shapiro used to practice, were another.  (This is stage magic, or prestidigitation.  As a youngster, Shapiro studied with and even assisted retired professional magician Al Cohn, 1891-1988, known as the “Sponge Ball King.”  The playwright was also fascinated by the notion of “real” magic, or necromancy, and read the works of occultist Aleister Crowley.  It was one of the things, alongside Marlowe’s poetry, that attracted him to Doctor Faustus.)  In the radio play, Shapiro put these words, partly a reference to his own childhood and partly an indictment of the establishment bosses (for not being better at their deceptions), into the mouth of Henry Faustus:

                 

When I was a boy I did magic tricks.  I made things appear and disappear, I changes ed one thing into another.  I found things that were lost and lost things that were found.  Cards, balls, silk handkerchiefs, rabbits.  Now I’m 500 years old.  You’d think I would have learned better tricks.  

Nothing Is Ever Lost, which would run about 80 minutes, was never produced or broadcast, though it may have been submitted to a local radio station in Taos County.  Given Shapiro’s habitual lack of subtlety in expressing his politics or his disdain for the establishment, especially in scripts where he was in control of the text (as opposed to plays written by others, like the original Doctor Faustus or even Bertolt Brecht’s The Measures Taken), it would have surprised me if he could have found a station ready to take on Nothing Is Ever Lost.  Consistent with Shapiro’s political leanings and his general suspicion of government—he was a supporter of anarchism and socialism and considered figures like Murray Bookchin and Michael Harrington, also a friend, influences—a main plotline in the play is a nuclear-waste threat and a government conspiracy involving the collusion of business and establishment leaders.  As usual, the theater artist wore his political heart on his sleeve—and I imagine that the daws did pick at it.  Still, Shapiro wanted to help the audience find the lost (or just hidden) things—without losing the things that were found.

*  *  *  *

In 1996, the New York-based Builders Association, a performance and media company, commissioned John Jesurun (b. 1951) to write a play.   A Faust story wasn’t anything Jesurun was contemplating as a subject, but that’s what the Theater Neumarkt of Zürich, the New York company’s financer, wanted.  “I said the only way I’ll write this is if you give me what I thought was an exorbitant amount of money.  It was a Faustian deal,” the writer said—even though he supposed on another occasion that selling his soul to the devil was something “I don’t think I would” ever do.  “It’s too much trouble.”  

“I thought they would say ‘no,’” Jesurun continued.  “But they said ‘yes,’ so I had to do it.”  But he took on the 500-year-old legend on his own terms—an approach for which the avant-garde writer, director, and multi-media artist famous for his integration of language, film, space, and media habitually took—and he “took the simple story . . . and attacked it in my own way.” 

The end result, FAUST/How I Rose, the playwright declared,

has very little resemblance to the German ‘Faust.’  It is really more about the devil than about Faust.  It’s sympathetic to the devil.  Faust has a friendly, if not a romantic relationship with the devil, who is played by a woman . . . .  It’s from the devil’s point of view.  I would suppose everyone has had the devil’s point of view at one time, because we’re human.

The Builders Association used excerpts of the play in Jesurun’s 1997 Jump Cut (Faust) and the full FAUST/How I Rose, then under the title Imperial Motel (Faust), premièred at Mexico City’s Teatro El Granero in 1998.  Jesurun has also directed a German version of How I Rose in Frankfurt at the Künstlerhaus Mousonturm in 1999.  The U.S. (and English-language) première, a co-production by Teatro de Arena and the National Theater Company of Mexico, a couple of Mexico City troupes, ran at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Harvey Theater in Fort Greene from 16 to 20 November 2004.  (The performance on 17 November was in Spanish without an English translation; all others were in English.)  Directed by Martín Acosta, who’s the artistic director of Teatro de Arena, the production was part of New York City’s Mexico Now, a multidisciplinary arts festival sponsored by the Mexican Consulate and Arts International.  The play’s English text was published in the Performing Arts Journal in September 2004. 

FAUST/How I Rose begins with the title character (Ari Brickman), whom Jersurun makes a jet-setting “international diplomat” in a black suit, flying over a burning city.  (This, and much else, is suggested by the actors, as there is little scenery.  “The scene is where the artist says it is,” explained Jesurun. “It throws logic out the window, and you are compelled to believe it.”)  Jesurun, also the show’s designer, employed a giant screen on which he projected videos.  Faust’s friend and confident, Phaedra (Guillermina Campuzano), is a mouse who’s an intellectual.  In an extended trial scene, Faust defends Gretchen, or Rhonda Kindermoerd (Carolina Politti), his assistant, against a charge of killing her unborn baby (her last name means ‘child murder’ in German).  She’s freed when the dead child (Manuel Domínguez) possesses the stenographer and testifies in Rhonda’s behalf.  

The focal character in Jesurun’s telling is Mephistopheles (Mónica Dionne), a female punk-rocker in a blue leather jacket with her red hair in spikes.  The play happens from her point of view.  This Mephistopheles, tossed out of heaven for inventing love (“So, ok it was a mistake.  How was I to know?”), is in love with Faust, who’s “too busy with his own reasoning” to take much notice.  Then Jesurun throws in a witches’ Sabbath, war, global political corruption, and what the New York Times’ Margo Jefferson described as “a civilization so jaded that even temptation looks petty and stupid.”  Nearly a dozen settings fly past in what the director called “an immense imaginary geography,” including earth (a postapocalyptic theater of war), hell (a doctor’s waiting room), a bad 24-hour diner, and a psychedelic porn theater.   Acosta called it a “pessimistic theater to conjure up the bad times that are giving us the eye; to raise questions—and light up flames.”  In the Village Voice, Michael Feingold characterized Jesurun’s script as “leaping from high tragedy to coarse put-down and from grandest archaism to lowest contemporary slang.”

Jesurun designed not only the set, but the videos as well.  The setting consisted of one large white, slightly raked, rectangular platform, which served as the performance area, and another rectangular form suspended on a slant over the platform.  Both forms served as screens for Jesurun’s videos, thus surrounding the characters with swirling images, not all of which clearly corresponded to the scenic moment, the spoken text, or the themes of the play (though sometimes they did most eloquently).  Images were projected on the floor and on the hanging screen, theoretically integrating the video with the live action as the video’s images shifted and moved. 

I saw Jesurun’s FAUST/How I Rose with my frequent theater partner, Diana, on Tuesday, 16 November 2004 and it was probably the worst piece of theater I’ve seen in many, many years.  I couldn’t figure out anything that Jesurun was doing or saying.  That pretty much sums it all up for me.  The performance lasted only 90 minutes, but it was the longest hour-and-a-half I’ve spent in the theater since I can recall.  If there’d been an intermission—they were smart—I’d have proposed to Diana (who also didn’t like the show) that we leave.  I haven’t done that in many, many years; I can remember only one time in well over two decades now.  (As it was, droves of people did leave during the performance.  I usually can’t bring myself to do that to working actors, but they weren’t really wrong in this instance.) 

I can’t even tell you anything so you can test my response—I couldn’t follow a thing in this play.  It was so muddled and bloviating, even when I could focus on the performance—my mind kept wandering—I couldn’t figure it out.  I mean, it obviously had some connection to the Faust legend, but beyond the sketchiest outline, I can’t even describe the narrative without help.  I won’t dignify it by calling it a plot.  (I cribbed much of the above synopsis and then used the published text to confirm my description.)  I assume Jesurun had something in mind when he wrote How I Rose, but I’ll be damned if I can see what it was.  What it resembled is something that a bunch of over-intellectualized high schoolers who think they’re really, really smart might put together.  (My companion called it “sophomoric,” but that sounds like college-level to me, so I offered “juvenile.”  “Pretentious” also came up, but they aren’t mutually exclusive.)

There was only one fun thing in the performance, but it was ruined halfway in.  I doubt it meant anything significant, but, then, how would I know?  There were at least half a dozen Beatles quotations in the dialogue (no singing) and the program material.  (Also one Dylan and one extensive Beach Boys.)  My problem later was that the performance was so enervating that I couldn’t remember most of the lyrics that were quoted.  The few I did retain were “Baby You Can Drive My Car” (used as a scene title in the program), “Lucy in the sky with diamonds” (Mephistopheles is also called Lucy—short, I presume, for Lucifer, though the character is a woman), “Picture yourself on a boat on a river.”  (Margo Jefferson also included one in her Times review I didn’t even remember—“wild thing”; either it went by me and I never heard it, or it was in a part of the show when I tuned out.)  There were others, but I couldn’t remember them until I looked them up later.  I also couldn’t remember the Dylan, but the Beach Boys’ was “Help me, Rhonda.  Help, help me, Rhonda.  Help me, Rhonda, yeah—get her out of my heart.”  The only fun I had was spotting them and trying to remember the songs they came from.  Some were the titles, of course, so those were easy.  Jesurun ruined this enjoyment by actually acknowledging the Beatles somewhere near the middle of the play.  Until then it was like one of those hidden-images pictures where you have to search out images of, say, animals, disguised in a forest scene.  As I said, though, what all those pop-music references meant is beyond my puny brain to figure out.  (A sample of how my mind was wandering: I kept wondering how all these pop-music quotes would work in the Spanish text.)

(I was at the Library for the Performing Arts a couple of days after the performance.  While I was waiting for something, I had a glance at the PAJ edition of the text and I found the Dylan quote I couldn’t remember: “. . . knock, knock, knocking on heaven’s door.”  In the play, the sense is literal.  I also spotted one of the other Beatles quotes I couldn’t remember: “strawberry fields forever”; it was just dropped into some dialogue.)

I never determined what the purpose of this gimmick is, but my bigger questions are—first, why would the Mexican companies choose to stage How I Rose?  It had been around some (since ’96), and Acosta even staged the Mexico City première in 1998.  Second, why would they export it to New York; and third, why would BAM accept it?  I find it hard to accept that my judgment is so off the beam that How I Rose might be considered good theater by someone with discernment—though the PAJ publication suggests, I suppose, that somebody thought it was worth documenting.  (Some people leaving behind me at the end of the BAM performance were extolling the production, but I suspect their taste and judgment.  There were even a few “Bravos” at the curtain call.  De gustibus non disputandum est, as my dad would say.  Or, perhaps more appropriately, “Audiences will buy trash, but not garbage”—a favorite admonition of the tech director at Rutgers.   You don’t suppose it’s a case of the play being so confusing and meaningless that no one can understand it, but everyone’s too afraid to admit that?  The emperor’s new play!)

I’m sorry I can’t say more about How I Rose to show if I was just dense or something.  Another example of my wandering mind that night was that I was thinking of how I’d describe this thing.  I never figured it out, though—as you can see.   I just couldn’t retain anything!  And the acting—everyone seemed to like to shout every now and then for no reason.  The cast were all Mexican and many had really heavy accents, plus, as Jefferson pointed out, some were mush-mouthed and speaking very fast, so there were parts of the dialogue I never understood, even when I tried to listen.

Jefferson’s review of How I Rose finally appeared in the Times on 19 November, the day before the last performance.  Jefferson essentially said—more articulately than I did—what I felt about the play, but I think she was far kinder.  I don’t know if she was soft-pedaling or if she really saw some valid artistry at work.  Characterizing it as “elaborate and obscure, flattering the intellectual vanity of artist and audience,” she described the production as “a postmodern pastiche of information and imagery” and “multimedia extravaganza.”  But “the Faust tale,” Jefferson asserted, “needs more than the hip intellectualism and multimedia projections.”  “Mr. Jesurun uses a rhetoric of self-conscious grandeur, slang and bits of rhyme and alliteration,” the Times writer reported; however, “Faust needs a verbal style that does more than simply toy with chaos and violent emotion.”  Jefferson also thought, “The occasional literary allusions and frequent rock lyrics don’t help” and that the “actors stride about the stage and strike attitudes.  They speak forcefully but not always clearly.  The script defeats them and the film engulfs them.”  “As for the design,” observed Jefferson, “images flow constantly onto the stage and a screen above it.  Some of them compelled, some drifted.”  In the end, she summed up, “It was very accomplished, and almost none of it mattered”—which is how I saw it. 

On the 18th, the only earlier review I’ve found (all the remaining print notices came out after the production closed), Jeremy McCarter of the New York Sun called FAUST/How I Rose a “wild riff” on the Faust legend that “scrambles past, present, and future,” and declared that it would “pitch even the strongest-stomached theatergoer, or the strongest souled, into metaphysical vertigo.”  The Sun review-writer continued that “anyone who knows the legend from the Goethe play will be, at best, perplexed.”  “Free associative, willfully obscure, and sporadically captivating,” McCarter described How I Rose, adding that the play “smacks of ‘Fantastic Voyage’ and an anxious seminarian’s dream.”  Remarking on the nearly bare stage, the Sun reviewer observed, “Bathing a stage and a company of actors in video is not an overwhelmingly novel approach to stagecraft.  But Mr. Jesurun’s best images have a galvanizing appeal.  They tend to show, or imply, elevation: lightning behind clouds, an escalator, the stars.”  McCarter also complained about Jesurun’s “far-flung” script: “Having seen the play, and read the script, and all the press materials thoughtfully assembled to accompany it, I still have only a fleeting sense of what ‘Faust/How I Rose’ is about.”  Jesurun and Acosta’s “use of live video provides a lift here and there,” the journalist asserted, describing some striking visual moments, but he found the cast “shouting some lines and turning away from the audience for others.”  McCarter summed up, “The show runs 90 minutes but feels much longer; it may be the densest piece to play the Harvey this side of the millennium. . . .  Mr. Jesurun’s play grows wearying.  Like Faust’s doomed plane, it lacks the fuel to complete its journey.” 

Prior to the show’s BAM opening, Village Voice writer Michael Feingold wrote in a preview: “Many things, including some audience members’ hackles, are bound to rise when John Jesurun’s Faust/How I Rose receives its New York unveiling.”  He warned us to “get your right brains ready for linguistic dislocations. . . the likes of which you’ve never experienced.”  Jesurun, who comes from a multi-lingual, multi-cultural background (his father’s family is from Curaçao, his mother’s is Puerto Rican, and as a military brat, Jesurun grew up on army bases including many years in Germany), “may be the perfect writer to play the devil with our everyday cultural parameters, livening up our isolationist notion of Eurocentric dead-white-guys art with a good dash of Mexican salsa roja.”  The Voice journalist analyzed the playwright’s dramaturgy this way:

If Jung described modern humanity as ‘in search of a soul,’ Jesurun’s games with language, time, and narrative, you might say, are being played over the void where that invisible object used to reside. In a world where dogged materialism and literal-mindedness seem to rule, he offers an escape hatch that comes without obligations to technology, machinery, or the ostensibly solid realities that, as political life has recently been teaching us, can vanish overnight if someone’s in a mood to throw his power around.  By the time Faust/How I Rose comes along, we’ll know if we’re in for four more years of devil’s deals or not; either way, our souls are likely to need the liberating lunacy of his verbal dance.

Then, four days after the U.S. première closed, Feingold wrote in his review of the play that it’s a “rich, densely allusive text” which Acosta’s Mexican troupe delivered “in a solemn, sometimes thickly accented English that made its iridescent, sly rapidly shifting verbal patterns seem ponderous and stilted.”  Though Ari Bruckman as Faust and Mónica Dionne as Mephistopheles “registered powerfully,” the “production as a whole felt strained.  The initial quality of every Jesurun text, a madcap breeziness, was lost in the effortful non-translation.”  Feingold ended his notice with the hope for How I Rose: “Someday, a troupe that can play it at its own colloquial speed will make that [i.e., the script’s depth of gravity] clear; at BAM in English, it felt like, of all things, a foreign classic.”

In the theater trade weekly Backstage, publishing the next month, Michael Lazan characterized FAUST/How I Rose as “fashionable to an uncomfortable extreme” which “consists of far too much dry, expository philosophical rambling, including utterly odd and annoying repetition of the names and lines from Beatles songs.”  Lazan suggested that “perhaps the audience would have been more mesmerized had the piece had more poeticism, more imagery, more magic” and reported that the “only respite from the text is the bare, gorgeous stage, as supplemented by trippy videos framing the action.”  The Teatro de Arena cast “seems mostly lost in this diffuse world,” the Backstager observed, and though the “talents” of a few actors “are sometimes evident, . . . Mónica Dionne, as Mephistopheles, is fairly flat and uninvolving though visually striking.  So is the production.”  In the cyber press, Dan Bacalzo on TheaterMania called BAM’s How I Rose “a flawed production” which is “somewhat fragmented in the actual playing of the scenes.”  Bacalzo found that “the richness and lyricism of Jesurun’s language is ill served by director Martín Acosta.  Too much of the time, the humor and poetry of the text is lost,” exacerbated by the “odd disjunctures and unlikely resonances” created by the interpolations of popular song lyrics.  In English, the cyber reviewer felt, “the show is hindered by a flatness in the overall delivery of the lines.”  In the end, the TM review-writer acknowledged that “the [video] images are often more interesting than what’s happening on the stage, so I found myself watching the screen as much as—if not more than—the live action.

In the academic press, Northwestern University’s Kathryn Farley, writing in the Theatre Journal, called How I Rose “an intricate and highly charged battle of wits between Faust and Mephistopheles” couched in “clever and current” dialogue that “proved humorous and poignant as well.”  Jesurun’s linguistic “concoction composed mostly of complex metaphysical constructs allowed otherwise intangible ideas to become increasingly more accessible and exciting” and the “pithiness of the spoken-word text was matched by the visual sophistication of the projected imagery.”  “The imagery,” Farley reported, “was lush and dazzling throughout.”  This reviewer found, however, that “many of Acosta’s directorial choices did little to highlight the cleverness of the script or the dramatic impact of the projected imagery.”  In particular, Farley complained of “ the rapid-fire pacing of the piece and the sloppiness of its vocal presentation” especially “the actors’ furious delivery.”  Furthermore, the Northwestern prof felt, “Acosta’s staging also seemed overly cautious and occasionally uninspired.” 

As I warned in the first installment of “Faust Clones,” I may not come to any general conclusion after reviewing these seven selected adaptations of the Faust legend.  I suspect that having chosen seven other plays wouldn’t have altered that result.  I also asserted that this collection, ranging in style, approach, and period, shows that Faust will perhaps always be a compelling and adaptable figure for theatrical portrayal.  The arrogant man who flouted every constraint of God and man to seek endless knowledge and power can be manipulated and manhandled to virtually any extreme, be made silly (Bedazzled), set to music (Gounod’s Faust or Damn Yankees), treated with admiration (Goethe’s Faust) or held up as a warning (Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus), made a figure of fun (Doctor Faustus Light the Lights), or post-modernized (FAUST/How I Rose) and survive to appear on a stage again in yet another incarnation.  Is there another literary character who’s had so many avatars?  Perhaps it’s simplistic to suggest that the notion of making a deal with the devil may just be so captivating that writers, poets, playwrights, composers, choreographers, filmmakers, and artists of all genres just can’t stop imagining and reimagining the implications.  Maybe that’s all there is to conclude from this examination. 

In any case, it was an interesting and engrossing exercise . . . at least for me.

Faust Clones, Part 2

[In “Faust Clones, Part 2,” I pick up my look at plays derived from the age-old Faust legend in the early 20th century, beginning with Gertrude Stein’s 1938 Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights, the first avant-garde adaptation in my exploration, and then moving on to the musical adaptation of the story, 1955’s Damn Yankees, and Richard Schechner’s 1992 FAUSTgastronome.  ROTters might be surprised how far this famous story can be stretched.  (Spoiler alert: The real test comes in Part 3 . . . but I won’t say anymore about that now.  I recommend that readers go back to Part 1, 15 January, to brush up on the background of the legend and some of the other works it inspired.)]

Written in 1938 by the American modernist playwright and poet Gertrude Stein (1874-1946), Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights is actually an opera libretto (for which the music was never composed) in three acts of verse and prose.  Now something of a baptism of fire for U.S. avant-gardists, it was first produced as a play in 1951 at Beaver College (now Arcadia University) in Glenside, Pennsylvania.  Productions have been mounted by such avant-garde strongholds as the Living Theatre (1951, directed by co-founder Judith Malina at the Cherry Lane Theatre, New York City), the Judson Poets’ Theatre (1979), and the Wooster Group (multimedia adaptation entitled House/Lights, directed by Elizabeth LeCompte with Kate Valk as Faustus, 1997-2001 at the Performing Garage and internationally; 2005 at St. Ann’s Warehouse, Brooklyn), as well as experimental artists like Richard Foreman (in French as La Fête électrique, Paris, 1982; Berlin, 1993) and Robert Wilson (Berlin and Lincoln Center, New York City, 1992—which I’ll discuss momentarily).  It’s also been a favorite of regional rep companies and college and university theaters, including Brown University (Production Workshop, 2011) and the prestigious Yale School of Drama (2011, with future Oscar-winner Lupita Nyong’o as Mephisto).  Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights also made another visit to New York City in 2001 as part of the New York International Fringe Festival, from the Duende Theater Company of Melton Mowbray, England, at the Paradise Theater in the East Village. 

Between 1913 and 1946, Stein experimented with what she called “dramatic narrative,” different from storytelling or even plot.  The play’s storyline isn’t laid out straightforwardly; it emerges piecemeal.  Stein’s playwriting employed shifting identities and what we now recognize as deconstruction.  Like her better-known poems, Stein’s stage dialogue includes repeated phrases, leading some characters to get caught in endless verbal Mobius strips.  “In the end what emerges,” said Margo Jefferson in the New York Times, “is a portrait of human consciousness: will, need, patterns of thought and action.”  Even though Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights is a retelling of the Faust legend, which ought to be grim and pessimistic, Stein leavened her version with whimsy and spontaneity.  Because the text is a libretto for an opera, intended to be supported and accompanied by music, singing, and dance, it’s more prose poetry than a play text.  This leaves a great deal of room for directors to use an array of staging styles and techniques, which may partially explain its popularity, especially among student and novice directors as well as experimenters.  Stein’s innovations have had a palpable influence on theatrical avant-gardists like Julian Beck (husband and partner of Judith Malina), Wilson, and Foreman.

In Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights, Faustus, a Dog (played by a human), and a Little Boy live suspended in a world of eternal light.  The Dog can’t bray at the moon anymore because there’s no night.  In Stein’s version of the tale, Faustus has already sold his soul to Mephisto—not for power or knowledge as in standard tellings like  Marlowe and Goethe, but for electric light—which New York Times’ Stephen Holden said in his review of the 1992 Lincoln Center staging was “the brilliant central metaphor for the human assumption of godlike powers.”  As Prometheus brought humanity fire, Faustus brings electric light and that becomes a motif in all productions of the play, each director devising her or his own technique of using light—and light bulbs—as a design focus.  It might also be significant that the name Lucifer in vulgate Latin means ‘light bearer.’  During the transaction, however, Faustus discovered that he had no soul to sell in the first place, so he considers the deal invalid.  He’s already grown bored with his soulless life on earth, beneath the harsh light of electricity that eliminates the distinction between night and day, and wants to go to hell immediately.  Faustus has found that he prefers the gentler light of candles, the illuminating technique of the time before technology.

The devil will take Faustus if he murders someone, so he gets Mr. Viper (also played by a human) to kill the Little Boy and the Dog.  Then, a woman born in the woods whom Stein named Marguerite Ida and Helena Annabel—often shortened by theater people to MIHA—is bitten by the Viper.  She comes to Doctor Faustus and asks him to save her.  Reluctant to do any good deed, lest it queer his shot at getting to hell, Faustus eventually cures her.  The devil has his eye on MIHA so he changes the terms of the deal and offers Faustus eternal youth if he convinces her to accompany him to hell.  Meanwhile, a Man from Over the Seas has begun to woo MIHA.  Faustus, feeling rejuvenated, presses MIHA to go with him, but she clings to the security of the Man from Over the Seas. She rejects Faustus, affirming her place in the world of the living.

MIHA, a single character who’s usually played by three or four actresses, is a composite of Margaret/Gretchen, the woman at the center of many versions of the legend, especially the Goethe, and Helen of Troy.  MIHA, recalling Eve, gains knowledge because of a snakebite.  The meaning of her four names is open to interpretation: some see her as avatars of one person, others as separate personalities, even a representation of something like multiple personality disorder.  The references in her names are also up for grabs, though Marguerite is clearly an allusion to Gretchen and Helena is obviously Helen of Troy.  Annabel may refer to the Hebrew name Hannah, which means ‘grace’ or ‘mercy,’ and may also refer to the mother of the Virgin Mary (though I found this explanation stretched).  Ida is possibly a reference to Rhea, the mother of Zeus (and hence Mother of the Gods in Greek and Roman mythology) who hid her son from the Titans in a cave on Mount Ida (another stretch to my ears), but whatever else it may signify, I think Stein was making an allusion to the author of Gräfin Faustine, an 1841 German novel with a female Faust character in the forefront.  The author’s name was Ida Hahn-Hahn (1805-80; that’s no typo—she was born a Hahn and she married a cousin named . . . you guessed it: Hahn!).  The novel, not very successful, was translated into English as Countess Faustine (London, 1844; New York, 1845) and I can’t but believe that Stein read it and probably admired the writer.

I said earlier that one of Stein’s experiments in playwriting was “shifting identities,” and this is part of the technique.  Faustus, whose name changes throughout the text, is also often performed by more than one actor and Mephisto is split into two characters, one dressed in red and one in black.  As I’ve already noted, the dog character is played by a human actor and speaks and Mr. Viper, an incarnation of the serpent in the Garden of Eden, is also portrayed by a human. 

On 7-9 July 1992, Robert Wilson directed a production (which he also conceived and designed) of Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights at Alice Tully Hall as part of the annual Lincoln Center’s Serious Fun! festival.  (Wilson had already directed Giacomo Manzoni’s opera Doctor Faustus, based on Thomas Mann’s novel, at Milan’s La Scala in 1989 and would go on to direct Gounod’s Faust in Warsaw in 2008 and Goethe’s Faust with the Berliner Ensemble in May 2015.) The 90-minute production of Stein’s Doctor Faustus was performed by the Hebbel-Theater Berlin, where it premièred on 15 April 1992, with music composed by Hans Peter Kuhn.  The lighting was created by Heinrich Brunke (with Andreas Fuchs taking over on tour), the costumes and make-up designed by Hans Thiemann and Cornelia Wentzel, and the choreography was created by Suzushi Hanayagi.  The cast at Lincoln Center was: Thilo  Mandel, Christian Ebert, Thomas Lehmann (Doctor Faustus); Heiko Senst (Mephisto in Red); Florian Fitz (Mephisto in Black); Katrin Heller, Wiebke Kayser, Gabriele Völsch (Marguerite Ida and Helen Annabel); Matthias Bundschuh (Little Boy); Karla Trippel (Dog); Christian Ebert (Boy); Wiebke Kayser (Girl); Martin Vogel (Country woman); Moritz Sostmann (Mr. Viper); Thomas Lehmann (Man from over the seas). The actors, all young Germans, spoke English at Lincoln Center, though most had learned the language phonetically just for these performances.  (The elocutionist was Bernd Kunstmann.) I saw this production more than 20 years ago, and it still startles me when I think of it. 

Wilson’s Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights staging included all the things audiences have learned to expect from the avant-gardist: the predominance of black, white, and red, the three basic colors the director habitually features (and a perfect palette for this play); plants rendered in geometric shapes; colored surfaces; and, most typical of Wilson’s stage work, the manipulation of light and darkness (another ideal fit for Stein’s Faustus).  In fact, John Rockwell of the New York Times declared that the director “transformed [Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights] into a classic Wilson piece.”  The theatrical auteur is also no stranger to playfulness and his production of the Faust story was amply buoyed with humor.  (The Serious Fun! brochure declared, “The Shocking Truth – Robert Wilson is Funny!”)  Wilson, of course, is renowned for his physical staging and visual work and he’s focused on the stage pictures and the look of his productions.  The most prominent visual element was, of course, light.  (Wilson himself designed the set, but the lighting was created by Heinrich Brunke.)  The set, more kinetic than Wilson’s usual environments, was dominated by bars of fluorescent light, like translucent 4x4’s, that were raised and lowered and seesawed through the air as the actors perched on them.  Squares of white light, representing heaven, appeared at the back of the black-draped set, shifting shape and color, then contracting and disappearing.  Arrays of light bulbs drifted onto the stage, then blazed and dimmed as the emotional tone of the scene changed.  When Mr. Viper bit one character, a blood-red rip ran through the black curtain at the back of the stage, accompanied by shrill electronic screeches.

While much of Stein’s text doesn’t make rational sense, both her play and Wilson’s production were less literary theater than sensual—words were put together, as the Christian Science Monitor reviewer quipped, “like a string of literary firecrackers” that affect us for their sound more than their sense, and the physical production was designed to appeal to our visual sense almost irrespectively of the story or the source legend.  (Wilson was educated as an architect and, along with his theater work, has worked as a sculptor and installation artist.)

Another of the director’s signature techniques is the movement of his actors.  In Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights, the actors (all students from a former East Berlin acting academy) moved not so much robotically, but more fluidly, a little like marionettes with some of their strings cut.  With chalky white face make-up, the actors made a striking, if emotionless, image.  (The director used this same look in his Threepenny Opera with the Berliner Ensemble in 2011.)  They moved mechanically (and therefore soullessly?), as if in a slow motion dream (a practice of Wilson’s), in accompaniment to Kuhn’s carnivalesque compositions. The Los Angeles Times’ reviewer described Kuhn’s score as bubbling “with insinuating honky-tonk motifs, jaunty little nursery rhyme melodies and a cacophonous burst of percussive sounds: breaking glass, exploding guns, slamming doors, screeching car wheels.”  (Kuhn has worked with Wilson since 1979 and usually employs sounds sampled from nature.  This was his first time composing actual songs.)

The match-up of Stein’s Minimalist poetry, which the L.A. Times writer likened to Dr. Seuss’s verses, and Wilson’s Expressionistic staging and design was a near perfect fit.  Kuhn’s score paired excellently with Stein’s text.  Theatergoers looking for a literary experience from the production, aside from the fact that they clearly didn’t know Wilson’s work, would have been disappointed, but those who could go with the visual and oral stimulation of the senses should have been thrilled at the fortuitous teaming of writer, director, and composer.  How faithful or even revealing Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights, in this presentation or any other, is as an exploration of the Faust legend, I won’t venture to guess—but as a piece of theater—well, as I said; it’s been two decades and I still can’t shake it.

*  *  *  *

The hit musical Damn Yankees opened on Broadway at the 46th Street Theatre on 5 May 1955.  With a book by George Abbott (1887-1995) and Douglass Wallop (who authored the 1954 novel The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant on which the play is based; 1920-85) and music and lyrics by Richard Adler (1921-2012) and Jerry Ross (1926-55), Damn Yankees ran 1,019 performances and won seven Tonys (and two additional nominations), including Best Musical.  Wallop’s novel and the story of the play (as well as the derived 1958 film version) successfully combines the American national pastime in the 1950s with the enduring Faust theme .

Damn Yankees centers on Joe Boyd, a middle-aged, happily married baseball fanatic. In his living room watching a game on television, Joe is disheartened because his favorite team, the Washington Senators, can’t seem to win a game (“Six Months Out of Every Year”).  No sooner does he mutter that he’d do anything for “one long-ball hitter” on the Senators than the devil, in the person of the slick salesman, Mr. Applegate, appears with a proposition: Would Joe be willing to trade his soul if the Senators not only win the pennant but the World Series, too?  Never having put much store in his soul, Joe makes the deal.  He says good-bye to his wife, Meg, while she’s sleeping (“Goodbye, Old Girl”) and disappears.  Instantly, Joe Boyd is transformed into the much younger Joe Hardy and magically acquires extraordinary talents on the baseball field (“Shoeless Joe from Hannibal, Mo”).

Meanwhile, over at Griffith Stadium, the Senators’ manager, Benny Van Buren, is trying to build up his team’s morale (“Heart”).  It seems a fruitless task, but Joe, the team’s new recruit, propels them to win after win.  The team bucks up, but Joe is depressed because he misses Meg, whom he left without leaving a clue to what’s happened to him.  He rents a room in her house just to be near her, but this only makes him more miserable, since he can’t tell Meg who he really is.  Mr. Applegate again intercedes. To lure Joe completely away from Meg, the devilish Applegate conjures up Lola, a beautiful witch, as a pinch-hitter to seduce Joe away from his wife (“A Little Brains, A Little Talent”).  Lola tells Joe that she’s used to getting anything on which she sets her sights (“Whatever Lola Wants”) and then demonstrates with a seductive mambo (“Who’s Got the Pain?”).

The formerly woebegone Washington Senators, with Joe as their star player, are on an unbreakable winning streak towards the American League title.  Joe, however, having resisted Lola’s temptations, realizes that there are more important things to him than baseball stardom, fan acclaim, and press celebrity and decides he wants to get back to Meg.  He asks Applegate to turn him back to Joe Boyd and the devil agrees to do so that night.  After several delays contrived by Applegate, Joe makes it to the stadium just in time to help his team recover from a loss to the Yankees before he’s returned to Joe Boyd, and Applegate is so angry and frustrated at this success that he transforms Joe on the field as he’s making the game-winning catch, a fly ball hit into right field by Mickey Mantle,  As soon as Joe makes the catch, he rushes off the field and back to his old house, hugging Meg so hard that even Applegate’s blandishments can’t pull him back into his grasp.  The devil throws a tantrum as Joe holds Meg tight, anticipating his return to his dull, old life as a die-hard, middle-aged Washington Senators fan.

On 31 December 2005, in Washington, D.C., I caught a performance at Arena Stage of Damn Yankees on the Fichandler Stage.  I’d never seen the 1955 musical on stage, just in the 1958 movie version (very similar to the ’55 Broadway outing despite one major cast change) and, in short, I’ll say that it was great fun and very well done.  (Some spectators may have known the name of the actor who played Mr. Applegate, the Devil originally played by Ray Walston: Brad Oscar, who was the original Franz Liebkind, playwright of Springtime for Hitler, the musical-within-the-musical of the Broadway première of The Producers.  He later also replaced Nathan Lane as Max Bialystock.)  Oscar was quite good—he got excellent reviews, including one I saw in Variety—but I kept feeling he was projecting a little too hard, as if he forgot he wasn’t in a Broadway house but the more intimate Arena Fichandler (the theater-in-the-round space). 

As I think I’ve said numerous times on ROT, when it comes to the old musicals, I have no critical distance.  They’re all nostalgic for me.  If I didn’t see them on stage when I was a kid, I saw the movies (as I did with Damn Yankees) or I listened to the albums, which my dad had from his youth.  I literally grew up on that music—and when I was little, I knew all the words to all the songs.  That said, Arena’s Damn Yankees, with Molly Smith, the company’s artistic director, staging, was a more-than-creditable production.  Oscar made a delightful devil—sort of a used-car-salesman-as-Beelzebub—and Meg Gillentine was very good as Lola.  (She was no Gwen Verdon—but, then, no one is.)  She tended to be a better dancer than actor—though she’s an excellent singer, as well—so her witchy seductress was a little by-the-numbers, but given Lola’s routines, that worked well enough.  (Lola’s numbers are almost all dance bits anyway.  The original creators expressly went in search of a dancer for the part.)

As for the Joes, Boyd and Hardy, Lawrence Redmond and Matt Bogart were both fine.  As it happens, I had seen them both at Arena before, Redmond as Luther Billis in South Pacific (another Ray Walston part, by the way) and Bogart as Lancelot in Camelot.  Smith did a nice job using the Fichandler’s arena space, which I always think is hard to pull off smoothly in a musical.  I’m sure arena staging is tough for any play, but I think it must be harder for a musical—especially the old ones which were conceived for proscenium stages.  The need to get all four sections of the audience some face-time with the actors necessitates some awkward promenading sometimes—moving people around for little logical reason.  In a straight play, you can create a set that gives motivation for such crosses—put a chair on one side, a table in another corner, and the actors have to go to them to sit or pick up a prop.  The dancing in a musical eliminates a lot of set pieces—the floor’s too small to accommodate both choreography and furniture—so the movements can seem arbitrary.  Smith and her choreographer, Baayork Lee, managed this nicely in Damn Yankees.  There was even one number with props that was marvelous—a dance with ’50s-era TV sets on wheeled stands.  It was a hoot—especially clothed (the dancers) and painted (the TV’s), as the production was, in the Day-Glo pastel colors that evoked the Eisenhower years.  (It kind of made me think of Miami Beach back in the days when I used to visit my grandfather there—the houses were all painted pink, yellow, lime green, and baby blue!  This wasn’t art-deco Miami but kitschy Miami Beach.) 

Damn Yankees isn’t a very deep play, despite its take on Faust.  Yeah, Joe might lose his soul to the Devil, and poor Meg may never see her hubby again and never know why—but you know that’s not going to happen, even if you’ve never seen Damn Yankees before.  It’s not that kind of show.  I mean, we’re not talking Carousel or Sweeney Todd here.  It’s the ’50s, for goodness’ sake.  So it’s just for fun, a little gratuitous sexiness.  (Not sex—Joe doesn’t succumb, of course.  What do you expect from a show with a song called “The Game” in which every potential sexual encounter ends when the ballplayers “think about the game, the game, the game”?  Like I said: the ’50s.)  But who cares, right?  It’s just a hoot, and the Arena version was more than just a great way to run up to the New Year’s Eve ball-drop—it was a more-than-enjoyable evening all around.  No one will ever make me forget Gwen Verdon’s Lola—I was barely a teenager when I saw the flick, but, man, that woman was still sexy when she was a grandmother!  (I saw her on stage in Sweet Charity in ’66 when she was 41 and Chicago in ’75 when she was 50.)  But you just have to put that aside, I guess, go with what ya got.  (A little this-a.  A little that-a.  With an emphasis on the latta.  You betcha!)

(I must confess to a little double-nostalgia connected to Damn Yankees.  If you know the story, Joe Boyd is a confirmed fan of the Washington Senators.  That’s the First-in-War-First-in-Peace-Last-in-the-American-League Washington Senators.  When I was a school kid in D.C., before the Senators moved out to Minneapolis-St. Paul to become the Twins, not only were the Senators our team—we got to listen to important games on the radio in class sometimes—but I had a classmate named Clare Griffith.  Her dad was Calvin Griffith, owner of Griffith Stadium and the Senators.  Clare had a younger brother and every year in the spring, her folks had swimming parties at their house for our class and her brother’s class.  We got off from school those afternoons!  Now, the full name of the team was the Washington National Senators—also known as the Nats—and D.C. finally got a new ball club in 2005.  They aren’t the Senators—but they are the Nationals.  I’m not a baseball fan anymore—I guess I quit when the Senators left town in 1960—but there’s still a twinge when I think of the Nats coming back home.  When the new Nats play the old Yankees, for some, it’s “those damn Yankees” all over again!  Siiiigh.

(Sidebar number two: At a 2013 exhibit of works by Washington artists from the ’40s to the ’80s, in a long, narrow gallery, I came across Marjorie Phillips’s Night Baseball (1951), a very literal painting, with which I wasn’t familiar, of a ballgame.  I wondered if the baseball diamond depicted might have been the old Griffith Stadium and I found out later that not only does the painting indeed depict that ballpark, but the game in progress is the iconic match-up of the Nats playing the hated New York Yankees—with “Joltin’ Joe” DiMaggio at the plate!  I now wonder if maybe the game in that painting might have been the inspiration for The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant, which, after all, came out only three years later.)

*  *  *  *

With FAUSTgastronome, Richard Schechner (b. 1934) and his East Coast Artists bring the Faust myth forward to the end of the 20th century with Faust as a cook-alchemist instead of a scholar-philosopher. The preparing, cooking, and eating of food is the focal metaphor for the destructive appetites of Western expansion which brought both Nazi genocide and the late-20th-century globalization, economic imperialism, and genetic manipulation. 

(I have wondered if Schechner got the idea as well as the play’s title from the then-nascent technique of molecular gastronomy, the marriage of physical and chemical science with cooking.  In his program note, after all, Schechner asserted that “cooking converts the raw (nature) into the cooked (culture).”  “Ah, yes,” quipped the reviewer for Newsday, Julius Novick: “a learned allusion to Levi-Strauss.”  Claude Levi-Strauss was a French anthropologist and ethnologist to whose works, especially The Savage Mind, Schechner referred often in his writing and teaching.) 

In Schechner and his collaborators’ version of the story, Mephistopheles, played by a woman dressed as a man but not disguising her biological gender, is aided by Hitler, also played by a woman. FAUSTgastronome draws substantially from Goethe’s Faust, with elements of the 16th-century Faustbuch and Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus (augmented with Adolf Hitler’s and Albert Speer’s speeches and announcements), and incorporates some of Gounod’s music (adapted and with additional music by Ralph Denzer and Michelle Kinney), some of which is sung in French; German dialogue from Goethe comprises a large part of Schechner’s text.  There are, of course, plenty of anachronisms drawn from Marlowe’s 16th century to the 20th up to the 1990s.  In his program note, the adapter-director described his production vision as

a “total theatre” approach—acting, singing, masking, dancing, performing, music making, environmental theatre design.  Every performance must express a meeting place between the political and the personal.

In an article in the Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, Carol Rosen maintained that Schechner’s script “travestied, pillaged, and shuffled Goethe (both Parts One and Two) and some of Marlowe”; D. J. R. Bruckner, the New York Times reviewer, noted simply that the Schechner’s cast “makes a fricassee out of” his sources and “cosmic ideas”; and in the same paper, Tom Ferrell remarked that FAUSTgastronome was “adapted—very adapted” from Goethe.  Using Goethe’s play as a starting point, Schechner connects the overweening ambition of Faust with Hitler’s rise (and by extension, that of more contemporary tyrants).  In the program note, the director explained that he saw that “the revel of individual power [is] derived from the devil, but exercised as a Renaissance bursting forth.”  Nonetheless, FAUSTgastronome, for all its Post-modern trappings, is still at core a romance, with the Satan-infused Faust essentially a romantic hero.  At the end of the day, Faust is in love with sweet, innocent Gretchen, the idealized female who may be his only salvation.  Schechner pointed out that Part One of Goethe’s play “poses the question: can ‘love’ redeem sin, is Love the Divine Principle, Love such as embodied by Gretchen.”  This doesn’t prevent Schechner from running in as many contemporary references and allusions as he can find. 

Schechner premièred FAUSTgastronome with ECA, in residence at La Mama E.T.C., between 1992 and 1995.  ECA developed the play in New York in stages and performed it in New York, across the U.S., and in the U.K.  I saw the production at La MaMa in Manhattan’s East Village in March 1993 with a cast of Leigh Brown, Shaula Chambliss, Daniel Wilkes Kelley, David Letwin, Ulla Neuerburg, Rebecca Ortese, Jeff Rickets, Laverne Summers, and Maria Vail.  The costumes were designed by Constance Hoffman.  I don’t believe the script has ever been published, but there is a video (from Hemispheric Institute Digital Video Library, 1994) of a performance, with a slightly different cast, at the Riverside Church (New York, 1994). 

(A brief word about Schechner’s title: in my own prose, I’m using what seems to be ECA’s preferred typography, but in quotations from periodicals, readers will see several idiosyncratic variations: Faust/Gastronome [Back Stage headline, Theatre Journal], Faust Gastronome [New York Times, Back Stage review], Faustus Gastronome [Chelsea Clinton News].  The Village Voice, Newsday, and the JDTC printed the title the same way I write it.)

Like Stein’s Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights, Schechner’s FAUSTgastronome’s plot is deliberately simple; in both cases, the dramatic narrative is more important than the story itself.  As theatergoers enter the house, Chef Faust (Jeff Rickets) is in his kitchen chopping vegetables and stirring them into a steaming pot, pounding flour into dough, checking recipe books, and eating lo mein from Chinese take-out cartons.  As the spectators make their ways across the downstage area and up to their seats the musicians come in and take their places.  Soon the house lights go down and the performance that’s already in progress formally begins.

Part One of FAUSTgastronome, with Faust as a master chef cooking a devil’s brew, gives new meaning to “Hell’s Kitchen.”  He’s already what Marc Rubenstein described in the Village Voice as “one of those know-it-all . . . kind of food tyrants.”  But that meal of Chinese noodles suddenly gives the chef a hellish case of the runs and, after defecating a string of sausages, a cache of gold coins, and a green balloon, Faust excretes Adolf Hitler (Ulla Neuerberg), in full dictatorial regalia and ranting away in German, from his bare ass.  (I swear, Rickets has the hairiest butt I can imagine!  The New York Times’ D. J. R. Bruckner observed that this scene “is ingenious, long and unfailingly funny; it may put viewers off food for months.”)  The Führer shows Faust how to capitalize on his appetites and Hitler’s handler, a licentious and mordant Mephistopheles (Rebecca Ortese), helps the chef use what Hitler’s revealed to him.  Soon Faust is dreaming of exquisite sauces demanded by great hotels around the world, control of major world corporations, awards and honors, and, most importantly, limitless sexual gratification.  (In his program note, Schechner himself described the impulse of the show as “phallic energy.”  To be sure the point that all ambition flows from sexual lust isn’t overlooked, Schechner has Faust constantly devouring phallus-shaped foods such as carrots and bananas.)  Other types of lust that play a role in FAUSTgastronome include racism, ageism, sexism, capitalism, and despoiling the environment.  In one scene, Faust seduces Gretchen (Maria Vail) with the help of Mephistopheles (whose blandishments include a rainbow, some baubles, and a pizza) but abandons her to her death when she becomes pregnant.  Screaming in pain, Gretchen bears Faust’s child. 

In Part Two, which Schechner describes as a “tragedy of development,” Faust is the head of the Fist Group of companies (remember that in German Faust means ‘fist’), which is engaged in genetic engineering and global exploitation (read: environmental pollution).  He tells the Nazis he can improve the human race more effectively.  On a late-night TV talk show, a (female) Arsenio Hall-like host (Laverne Summers), black and hip, interviews Albert Speer (David Litwin), Hitler’s chief architect, so he can justify World War II and the Holocaust.  Hitler makes a brief appearance on the show, delivering one of the Führer’s screeds on Aryan racial purity in German as a caricature of a Jew out of Der Stürmer kneels in front of him and holds up English subtitles.  Later, Faust appears on the same show with a teenaged skinhead (Shaula Chambliss) dressed in a Girl Scout uniform and draped in Old Glory, spouting hatred to polite applause..  At the end of the play, female demons prepare Faust for death and feed him a last meal.  At first, it’s gentle and loving, leading Faust to think he’s being seduced, but turns increasingly violent and brutal as the cook’s stripped naked and the demons smear Chinese take-out all over Faust’s body and cram it down his throat.  At his end, the demons throw Faust into a cauldron.   Just before his death and damnation, Gretchen comes looking for Faust to escort him to hell.  She catalogues the crimes against humanity of which this Faust has been guilty and, then as the demons dispose of the Satanic chef, she sits at Faust’s table and finishes eating.

The set, designed by Chris Müller and lit by Lenore Doxsee, consisted of three rough-hewn, wooden tables.  The rectangular tables served as Faust’s kitchen work station at the beginning of FAUSTgastronome and at the end, they conjured up his infernal banquet room.  During other parts of the play, the tables were sometimes rearranged to suggest a bedroom and a prison; occasionally they were turned over to reveal scenes of hell painted underneath the tabletops.  On a platform upstage, composer Denzer conducted a small jazz combo. This was all squeezed into a small house at La MaMa, hindering Schechner’s habitual expansive stage vision.  (At times I felt as if I were staring up at actors hovering right above me—not always an inviting view in FAUSTgastronome.)

Constance Hoffman’s costumes were separated into two styles.  The more flamboyant characters were assigned showier costumes and props, like Mephistopheles’ black top hat and tails, white tie, and single high-heel shoe.  She bore a cloven hoof and a long, rubber lizard-like tail that ended in a porn-shop dildo.  (Ortese thrust this pudendal extremity under other characters’ noses like a microphone when she “interviewed” them at various moments.)  Hitler was, of course, kitted out in his familiar khaki uniform, complete with Sam Brown belt and riding boots.  (She also wore an approximation of Der Führer’s well-known coiffe and his Charlie Chaplin ’stache.)  Other characters wore rude, generalized peasant garb in dull earth tones. 

Schechner’s FAUSTgastronome, which recalls his work of the late ’60s and early ’70s, was striking in both its physical imagery and its obsession with sex.  For me, the performance didn’t generate the kick of witnessing the boundaries of conventional theater being breached that exuded from the innovator’s best work with the Performance Group (founded in 1968) in those decades.  For one thing, Schechner’s notion of a chef as a creative mastermind wasn’t ever as compelling as the director asserted.  (It isn’t even the first time this juxtaposition was tried—if you count the 1967 film Bedazzled in which Dudley Moore, the Faust figure, plays a cook at a hamburger joint.) It seems at first an amusing and provocative idea, but it wasn’t fully enough developed in the performance text (a Schechner concept) to carry the premise off.  (The amusing aspect of the idea is spotlighted by the juxtaposition of Faust’s portrayal as a gourmet chef while he fresses on carry-out Chinese food from cardboard containers!  Even his last meal is Chinese take-out.  Unfortunately, however, nothing is made of this tomfoolery.)  

Back in the day, Schechner, whom I met for the first time in the fall of 1969 in Lexington, Virginia, when he came to Washington and Lee University for a workshop with theater students, was synonymous with vanguard.  (Schechner’d been a schoolmate at Tulane of W&L’s theater director, Leonel Kahn.  Schechner became one of my graduate professors when I attended NYU 15 years later.)  But the ECA performance left me torn because FAUSTgastronome was simultaneously bold and self-indulgent, sharp and shallow, revelatory and sex-obsessed.  Julius Novick of Newsday described the production as “arbitrary, imposed, smart-alecky,” which approximates my own response.  (Novick also said he had the “sense of Richard Schechner . . . saying ‘Look!  Aren’t I shocking?’” a feeling I had as well both here and at his 1986 experiment, The Prometheus Project.)

Reviews of FAUSTgastronome were all over the field.  In his Times notice, Bruckner dubbed the play and production “a feast of pungent old-fashioned ribaldry” in which the “songs by Ralph Denzer and Michelle Kinney cut up not only opera, but even rap. Poor Gounod is fried and refried, in a dancing chorus of cows with heads on their hindquarters, in a lubricious parade of the Seven Deadly Sins and in a Mephistophelean song that sounds borrowed from Anna Russell.”  While praising “the performance art of very talented actors” from ECA, the Timesman pronounced it all “great fun for 90 minutes,” until Schechner “turns the philosophical Part 2 of Goethe’s ‘Faust’ into a talk show for half an hour and, while it has its moments, there are not enough of them.”  Bruckner suggested, “Better he had stopped the show when Mephistopheles seizes Faust and sends him to hell in a stock pot; that is the last good laugh.”  In a later column, the Times’ Steven Druckman, calling the play “a stew of Goethe’s ‘Faust,’ Marlowe’s ‘Doctor Faustus’ and Gounod’s opera,” remarked, “There were moments of such gluttony that audiences had to step over stray bits of food on their way out.”  In  Newsday, in addition to the characterization I cited earlier, Julius Novick acknowledged that “the pathetic fascination of the old tale is not lost” and that “[e]nergy, intellect, and theatrical flair are by no means entirely missing from ‘FAUSTgastronome.’”  He described the show as “well performed,” praising the actors individually, and said that the music was “agreeable and well-used,” but found the talk-show sequence “long” and “tiresome” and its Jewish caricature “one of the most offensive stage images I have ever seen.”  The connection between “cooking” and “culture,” while a valid “way of looking at Faust’s quest,” “is never made manifest on stage.”  In conclusion, Novick asserted, “Richard Schechner has been a significant theater artist, and might be one again if he could only control the sophomoric bad-boy urges that so frequently assail him.”

“Richard Schechner’s production is simultaneously adventurous and self-important, fiery and prodigal, sensuous and indulgent, quick-witted and facile” observed Marc Robinson in the Village Voice.  He described FAUSTgastronome as “stockpot style—sometimes clever, sometimes vulgar” and acknowledged that “it nonetheless makes thematic sense” in Schechner’s context.  The play’s “testosterone-driven view of life is often good-humored and only mildly embarrassing,” asserted Robinson, and the ECA’s “appealing ensemble” showed “considerable rigor.”  “At its best, FAUSTgastronome is . . . high-spirited . . . and, in the end, persuasive,” but Robinson felt that “Schechner spent so much energy demonstrating the many similes of lust . . . there is little opportunity to reveal the more inward workings of Faust’s ambition.”  He concluded that “we never quite feel ourselves attracted to Faust’s individualism and never question or own longings.”  Calling FAUSTgastronome “dazzling.” “senuous” and “satiric” in the Chelsea Clinton News, Dan Isaac characterized the play as “a marvelous mock epic.”  The performances, Isaac said, are “[w]ithout exception . . . top-grade.”  In contrast, Sy Syna dubbed Schechner’s version of Faust’s story a “superficial, whirligig-paced, often-distasteful farce carrying enough messages to overload a mailman’s pouch” in Back Stage and bemoaned “the caperings and cavorting of this cast.”

Academic theater journals chimed in as well.  In JDTC, Carol Rosen, noting that FAUSTgastronome shared with Schechner’s earlier work “a single phallocentric point of view,” called the play “a daring work-in-progress, linking Faustian appetites to the cult of celebrity on American chat shows.”  It was, Rosen asserted, “an homage to Grotowski’s 1963 Dr. Faustus [based on Marlowe] as audience banquet, a vaudeville of birthings and bodies, feasts and sly anachronisms.”  She explained, “This production turned Faust upside down and inside out . . . .  In fact,” the reviewer pointed out, Schechner’s principle here, as always before, was to leave no stone unturned.  Though Rosen determined that the play’s “concept sounds like vintage Schechner, . . . it is still old wine in new bottles,” she lamented.  The cast “brought a lot to the table,” she reported, performing “tasks [that] were physically strenuous, and required discipline and quirky humor as well as frequent leaps of faith in the project.”  Rosen’s major complaint, however, was that, despite the lofty theatrical and metaphysical ideas Schechner promises, “Faust was still played as a Romantic hero.  He was hip, American, and bland in his desires, but he was, nevertheless, still a conventional Romantic hero.”   

In Theatre Journal, NYU’s Sharon Mazer declared, “Faust/Gastronome is simultaneously rowdy, rough, grotesque, and sophisticated, a theatrical alchemy,” rendering “the tale . . .  both exhilarating and cautionary, an invitation to celebrate the unfettering of our basest desires and a reminder of the costs to society and the earth of our excesses.”  This world, wrote the reviewer, was “created before us by a company of skillful shape-shifters, and underscored throughout by music that is both original and a pastiche of contemporary trends.”  Mazer described the “crucial” talk-show scene as “a stunning moment” that “highlights” our “collusion” with “the hatemongers, and self-satisfying celebrities” before, one hopes, “our celebration must ultimately be tempered by our recognition of its costs to our own humanity.”  (Note: FAUSTgastronome and this review were written before the pheonomenon of presidential candidate Donald Trump and his hordes of faithful—and increasing—supporters.)

[That brings us up to the last decade of the 20th century.  As I said in the introduction of “Faust Clones, Part 2,” the real test of how far a playwright can go with the Faust legend and still not break the thread comes up in the next and final installment of my examination.  Come back in a few days to see where this study leads.  Besides John Jesurun’s far-out rendering of the story, there’s a small treat in Part 3: a report on an unproduced play by Leonardo Shapiro, the late East Village experimentalist.  I think you’ll find it interesting.]