Psst, Mephistopheles, are you still around, making deals on behalf of the Devil? Promise to give me back the two hours I spent enduring the Classic Stage Company’s misguided production of Christopher Marlowe’s “Doctor Faustus,” and maybe we can come to an agreement. Eternal damnation doesn’t seem all that bothersome if my memories of this show, starring Chris Noth as the titular soul seller and Zach Grenier as Mephistopheles, can be permanently erased.
The production, directed by the veteran Andrei Belgrader, employs a heavily adapted text by David Bridel and Mr. Belgrader. Language has been modernized: “thou” becoming “you” and “hath” becoming “has,” etc. Characters have been tweaked or eliminated, speeches curtailed. Some innovations are helpful, such as having Wagner (Walker Jones), Doctor Faustus’s loyal assistant, pipe up with translations of the Latin that Marlowe sprinkled through the text.
Others, not so much. This updated colloquial comedy is not an improvement on the original. (And if thou cannot improve on centuries-old comedy, thou art in trouble.) But, in general, the emendations and cuts are not particularly detrimental to the drama, since there isn’t much in the first place. “Doctor Faustus” is not a text of particular sanctity; it’s rarely performed, and rather than a “tragical history,” as it was called, the play is more a moral (or rather amoral) pageant depicting the title character romping through the world, causing mischief after making that famous pact with the Devil.
Mr. Noth deserves some credit for undertaking this challenging and not entirely rewarding classical role. Then again, maybe some therapy might be in order, too? Well known for his television work — scouring the New York streets for villains on “Law & Order,” toying with the heart of poor Carrie Bradshaw on “Sex and the City” and later playing the tough governor of Illinois on “The Good Wife” — he has made sporadic appearances on the New York stage, most recently in Gore Vidal’s “The Best Man.” He’s a fine actor with natural magnetism and a smooth, dark voice.
But the ornate and often arcane language of Marlowe (even without the “thous”) does not come naturally to him, and while Mr. Noth does his best to animate Doctor Faustus’s strange odyssey, he fails to imbue the character with either any exultation in his dark powers, or the subterranean ambivalence of a man whose conscience eventually begins to gnaw at him as the final reckoning approaches.
Mr. Grenier (who also appears on “The Good Wife”) fares better as a rather gloomy Mephistopheles, who first shuffles onstage looking like a slab of concrete accessorized with the agonized faces of souls in torment, and then shows up again clad in the humble garb of a monk. Mr. Grenier’s black-velvet voice wraps itself around the language with finesse, and his great, doleful eyes suggest that Mephistopheles is, as he admits, “in hell” even on earth, having once been an angel basking in the presence of God before he slipped up and got in cahoots with Lucifer.
Now he glides down, or rather up, whenever someone praises the Devil and damns the Lord, as Doctor Faustus, sated with learning that doesn’t satisfy, does in the opening scene. After signing a blood pact with manly fortitude and staunch enthusiasm, Faustus is granted 24 years of life with Mephistopheles at hand to do his bidding. Then his soul will be damned to hell, of course.
By today’s standards, unfortunately, the wicked fun and games Faustus and friends get up to don’t appear particularly naughty or even enjoyable. Sure, they tease the pope and a cardinal by making their food and drink disappear. (Ha-ha.) At the behest of an emperor, Faustus conjures the spirit of Alexander the Great. And, in one of the play’s most famous sequences, Faustus raises the spirit of Helen of Troy. Here played by the comely Marina Lazzaretto, she slinks out of her stuffy formal gown to enfold Faustus in a naked embrace.
But mostly, these diversions seem rather tame: It’s not really all that much fun to chat with the seven deadly sins, for instance. (Most of us have at least a nodding acquaintance with a few of them.) Mr. Belgrader and Mr. Bridel have tried to enliven the proceedings by inviting some in the audience to join in the revels — Mephistopheles teasingly searches the seats for the embodiment of the sin of pride — but these devices are not terribly inventive, either.
Watching over these shenanigans are Wagner, played with sly humor by Mr. Jones, and two dumb-and-dumber rustics: Robin, played as an uber-doofus by Lucas Caleb Rooney, and the still dimmer bulb Dick (roughly the equivalent of Rafe in the original text), whom Ken Cheeseman portrays as a yokel who garbles his English oddly. Still, as I mentioned earlier, the updated shtick Mr. Bridel and Mr. Belgrader have fashioned for these fine comic actors, while certainly easier to comprehend in terms of language, doesn’t exactly render anyone helpless with laughter.
The production’s central problem remains Mr. Noth’s inability to invest his Doctor Faustus with palpable inner life. He’s not terribly convincing either in his moments of unbridled pleasure and pride in doing dark deeds, or as a tormented man grappling with the vestiges of his conscience. In the end, Mr. Noth’s Faustus comes across as a man who doesn’t actually have a soul to sell. Turns out this time the Devil got a raw deal.
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