Faust, Part 1
Jeffrey R. Smith
Thursday, June 25, 2009
forallevents.com

The Shotgun Players are now performing Faust, Part 1 at the Ashby Stage in Berkeley.

Mark Jackson writes, directs and acts in this startling, yea even shocking, rendition of the proverbial Mephistophelean contract.

Faust—played by Mark Jackson—seems a little vertically translated from the Faust we might think we remember from Goethe.

Goethe's Faust is a bit reminiscent of the story of Job: like Job, Faust is a victim: the object of a supernatural wager.

In this case Mephistopheles makes a wager with God regarding the fundamentally fallen or corrupt nature of Faust.

The Faust of Goethe is a man for all seasons, an intellectual, scientist, alchemist, etc. who is innocently plodding: striving to learn all that is worth knowing.

Mark Jackson's Faust is a frustrated middle-aged man, insulated and alienated from the hoi polio by his own sense of intellectual superiority; his Faust eagerly parlays his sophistication; shucks his contemplative life for a debauching digression with a naïve virgin youth.

Mark Jackson may be exposing the fundamental fantasy that serves as the mainspring—the engine—for the intelligent, ambitious man: that his accrued knowledge, wealth and power can be parlayed into meaningful sexual dalliances with beautiful voluptuous women.

Like the average middle-aged man, Faust quickly wearies of the mortal angel—the apparition of Aphrodite—that he was all too eager to trade his soul for.

This is must be the California Faust.

Faust attains no knowledge: esoteric or scientific or otherwise, from Mephistopheles; instead he gets coached on the romantic arts of seduction: he is taught to be a boulevardier: a lothario.

Faust learns how to attain his share of sensuous pulchritude and steamy unbridled concupiscence from the abundant wellspring of Gretchen.

Gretchen snaps at the trinkets, bling-bling or baubles offered by Faust like a barracuda snaps at chromium minnows laced with treble hooks.

No sooner does Faust close escrow with Gretchen then corpses begin to litter the stage.

As Shakespeare once said, "Only my plague thus far I count my gain,
That she that makes me sin awards me pain." (Sonnet CXLI)

Faust is awarded pain: if this is California Faust, it retains the priggish moral integrity or karmic inevitability of German Catholic tragedy or Morality Plays.

Blythe Foster is superb as Gretchen particularly as she blithely (no pun intended) pours the whole amphora—okay vial—of sleeping potion into her mother's toddy, rather than the three drops recommended by the Devilish Pharmacist: Mephistopheles.

Peter Ruocco is unctuously slick as Mephistopheles: were the audience not tutored on FAUST prior to the show, they might mistake Ruocco's Mephistopheles for a benign, sagely, generous godfather.

Mephistopheles never injures anybody: he just provides all the necessary tools.

Sound man Matt Stines contributions the auditory, vibratory, sensory and subliminal: his bass line causes the audience's seating to tremble and their spines to tingle: he plants woofers and sub-woofers in the Ashby Stage that will fibrillate your adipose and resonant your vertebrae.

In these desperate times, Mephistophelean contracts are lying about like fly paper; before you start drawing blood to sign on the dotted line, get thee first to the Ashby Stage.

For tickets to an absolutely riveting show, with moral overtones, contact the box office at www.shotgunplayers.org or call on your cell—NOT while you are in a play or driving—510 841-7468.