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We witness, we endure, and the devil gives a damn ... The Target Margin Theater, in its new production, Faust in Love, presents us with a novelty: a Mephisto who disappears and takes the whole classic drama with him. Some might say that is a great solution to the many questions and problems Goethe spent a lifetime trying to present to us as poetry designed for the stage. How is that done? Well, like Goethe, it starts with the beginning. Goethe gives us two prologues: one in the theater -- a discourse between the manager, dramatic poet, and jester in which they argue about the efficacy and purpose of the play taking into consideration the public that fills the theater's seats; and one in heaven between God and Mephistopheles, in which they set the terms for a wager over Faust's soul. Forget about it. Target Margin reduces it to the prologue of the director who in the mode of the friendly media newsman neighbor reminds the gathered audience to join them for future shows, turn off cell phones, and stay friends with the company of actors and artists. This is followed by a version of the play that is a double adaptation. The first, from German to English, by Douglas Langworthy, has simplicity and clarity. The second is the adaptation of the play to the skeleton of a myth to which actors and audience have a faint but amused and ironic relationship. If the actors now are relieved of the burdens of the old play, how do they quench their thirst and hunger for dramatic appearance? They manage when they're off-stage (where they are seen) staring vacantly into the void while waiting for their next scene -- or when they are moving scenery -- sharing, with the audience as visitors, a nightclub called Hell where the tune doesn't change for an hour and ten minutes. Faust in Love is conceptual theater. And in this, it succeeds. Mephisto doesn't play his tricks on the actors onstage, but on the audience, telling them: There is no play. In Goethe's Prologue in Heaven, Mephistopheles confesses to God: Man
in his wretched days makes me lament him; "Faust
in Love" Copyright © 2005 by theater2k.com. All rights reserved. |
