Shotgun Players deal a 'Faust' for our times
Robert Hurwitt, Chronicle Theater Critic
Monday, May 25, 2009
San Francisco Chronicle

The devil is in the details in Mark Jackson's Faust, Part 1. No, that's not just a pun. The details are what make Jackson's radically stripped-down adaptation of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's sprawling drama an exhilarating experience in the Shotgun Players world premiere that opened Friday at Ashby Stage.

Jackson doesn't play fast and loose with Goethe. He's jettisoned dozens of characters and the bulk of the text, cutting it to less than two hours. But much of his script is remarkably true to the original, including deft replications of Goethe's playful use of rhymed couplets and quatrains.

This is a funny Faust, but an intellectually stimulating, startlingly bloody and emotionally gripping one as well. The humor is used to keep the mind alert and engaged as it percolates through the details of Jackson's translation and his trademark physically based acting style.

In an unusual move, Jackson co-directed Faust, with Kevin Clarke (who also designed the costumes), so that he could play the title role. The story has been stripped to its central interaction between the world-weary intellectual Faust, Peter Ruocco's sharp-witted Mephistopheles and Gretchen (Blythe Foster), the innocent maiden who falls fatally in love with Faust as part of the devil's plan to win Faust's soul.

The tall, angular, bushy-eyebrowed Jackson pulls us in with his rigorously stylized focus, using exaggerated gestures and pauses to layer Goethe's satire on philosophy, politics and religion with the comedy of Faust's intellectual arrogance. The shorter, calmer Ruocco is his perfect comic and dramatic foil, listening with an eerily unblinking gaze and playing the devil's true advocate with diabolically persuasive dispassion.

Foster's mesmerizing Gretchen provides the emotional core, whether in the sweet realism of her bewildered passion, warbling one of Goethe's loveliest songs (in German) or matching Jackson's physicality in astonishingly effective repeated variations on a wooing scene and a heart-wrenching Walpurgisnacht solo. But every detail of this Faust contributes to its success, from the sharply etched supporting cameos by Zehra Berkman, Dara Yazdani and Phil Lowery to the expressive sound effects (by Matt Stines) and the dramatic washes of Joan Arhelger's lights over the columnar birch trees of Nina Ball's set.

The action builds inexorably to such riveting effect that nearly two, uninterrupted hours pass with surprising swiftness, even on the Ashby's hard pews. Stark, funny, sobering and provocative, this is a Faust for our times.