[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,the Schechner’s cast “makes a fricassee out of” his sources
and “cosmic ideas”; and in the same paper, Tom Ferrell remarked that FAUSTgastronome 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.]
