An Apology for the Course & Outcome of Certain Events Delivered by Doctor John Faustus on This His Final Evening
The more it’s tapped, the more Theater Oobleck’s well of creativity seems to replenish itself. A decade ago, this scraggly band of political and literary renegades arrived from Ann Arbor to produce a string of sprawling, ambitious, exhaustively entertaining plays. Holed up on Broadway in the former home of onetime avant-garde darlings IgLoo Theater, Oobleck worked so fast and furiously that their torrent of brilliance seemed destined to dry up in short order. The withering of their work a few years later, when they moved north to Andersonville, appeared to confirm the inevitable.
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But after a brief hiatus, Oobleck proved the smug naysayers (myself included) dead wrong with works like David Barnstraw’s Antistasia, David Isaacson’s The Making of Freud and Babette’s Feast, and Danny Thompson’s Necessity. In recent years they’ve managed to combine their early leftist iconoclasm and operatic fancy with a rigorous reexploration of the basics of character and plot. As a result, the outrageous is now more focused than ever.
Further diminishing Faust is the decidedly incidental nature of Mephistopheles’ evil. He’s no master manipulator, no titanic force; he’s just a noodge, an annoying roommate leaving crumbs in Faust’s bed and perpetually reading over his shoulder. Maher’s Mephistopheles–played by an exquisitely indifferent Colm O’Reilly–sits like a block of wood enduring Faust’s blather in silent boredom for the entire hour, driving the good doctor mad. In Maher’s vision, evil is implacably banal, an incessant minor irritant stealing one’s dignity at every turn.
