Lucy Gellman Photo
“I think I’m excited by every atom of it. It’s so very different to do a show that’s our project, our adaptation, our play, our writing. I get so connected to it,” said Andrej Visky, director of the Yale Cabaret‘s upcoming production of Faustus, as he described how what had begun as a long-term love affair with Christopher Marlowe’s play was now near completion. “I really hope that we are able to trick the audience the same way Mephistopheles tricks Faustus.”
Visky will soon be able to see if that happens. Seated with co-adapters Ke-Yoon Nahm and Rachel Carpman in the Yale Summer Cabaret’s Park Street offices last Sunday, he discussed the trio’s gutsy adaptation of Marlowe’s The Tragical History of The Life and Death of Dr. Faustus, opening this Thursday night and running through Saturday August 1. While Visky is the primary director of the adaptation, the process of developing Faustus has been incredibly collaborative, dovetailing with the Summer Cab’s theme of “rough magic” as it gets to the sinister and mystifying heart of a canonical morality tale … with puppets.
Based on the German Faust legend, Marlowe’s play follows the brilliant but bitterly unhappy scholar-scientist Faustus as he makes a pact with the devil. Faustus gets 24 years to do super-human work with a set of magic powers supplied by Lucifer’s servant Mephistopheles, after which his soul will be condemned to eternal damnation. Existing in what Carpman calls “a super Christian cosmos to which we needed to find a modern parallel,” it has become one of the most performed works in theatrical history.
That doesn’t mean that the Cab’s team felt like there were any specific expectations in place. Instead, Faustus’s popularity lent it to creative adaptation, the team embracing a certain permission to experiment, fail, and experiment again as they unspooled the early modern narrative. Enter a radical reorganization of text and the inclusion of puppets, which Visky had been dreaming about for years.
“I was carrying this project for a long period of time inside myself,” said Visky. “I’ve seen tremendous potential in human beings interacting with puppets, having both of those things on stage. There was an idea that sparked very early on … that after Faustus signs the contract, he will turn into a puppet…. A puppet can do so many things that us as human beings can’t do, which is described beautifully in the original Marlowe text.”
“The story of Faustus is basically like a series of coat hangers that you can put anything on,” added Nahm, a student in Yale’s doctor of drama program who joked that the perpetual scholar narrative was instantly relatable to him. “You know how it begins, you know how it ends, and it’s just the middle part where you can sort of do whatever you want. Part of what drew me in is that the play has a long history of puppet theater, of popular theater, of different people just taking bits and pieces of Marlowe’s text and doing whatever they want with it.”
So the Yale Cab has several life-size, human-carried Faustuses and Mephistopheleses that could leave the audience wondering how they should distinguish the puppeteer from the puppet, or which party — the puppet or the actor — they should pay attention to during different scenes. Or how to handle the fusion of contemporary role-playing, TV projection, and Faustus narratives British and German, early modern and Romantic, the play uses to introduce new and minor characters to the story’s familiar framework. Or what to do with the physical comedy that seems utterly at odds with morality, until the inherent clownishness of morality — and of the fatal bargain — is revealed.
Decisions like these add complexity to the play, the earliest versions of which present right and wrong in largely black-and-white terms. In the space of the 90-minute adaptation, the audience will have to grapple with big themes — idealism versus skepticism, personal versus professional ambitions, and how far any one power play can go — in a little space. And then come face-to-face with each other in the daylight, wondering how much they would need to be swayed before making a deal with the devil.