‘FAUST’ LEGEND WITH A TWIST

“One of the reasons I like California,” offered visiting director David Kaplan, “is that the light is different here. It’s more playful. Pink is a viable color. In New York it would be considered silly and spurious and frivolous.”

Kaplan is banking on that particular brand of local enlightenment and humor to greet Saturday’s opening of “Dr. Faustus Lights the Lights” (at the Ensemble Studio Theatre), Gertrude Stein’s fanciful retelling of the Faust legend.

How fanciful? Kaplan acknowledged that some audience pre-preparation may be in order.

“It’s like when you hear Sarah Vaughan sing: You have to hear the melody first, before you hear the variation,” said the 31-year old New Yorker. “So I begin with a slide show, written and delivered by a 7-year-old boy and and 8-year-old girl. And we do a little playlet, with the boy acting out Faust and the girl as the Devil.

“Then I do a cut-down opera version, 10 minutes long, from Boito’s ‘Mephistopheles’ (circa 1880). So we go from the children’s treatment to the same story being done as a romantic, schmaltzy opera. Then when I get to the Gertrude Stein weirdness--which is a word I don’t want to use--when I get to the Gertrude Stein variation, you know what it is.”

Stein’s work, Kaplan noted, was originally written (in 1938) as an opera libretto, “but the guy who was supposed to do the music was upset about what was happening politically and said, ‘I just can’t write it.’ So no one ever did.”

Yet even standing alone, Stein’s words--quixotic, ruminative, repetitive--often resemble music in their pace and flow. (“There you are, you just are, you just are.”)

“Stein loves repetition the way a child does,” Kaplan agreed. “But it’s also a very aesthetic idea--that thinking is melodic. It’s (composer) Philip Glass’ idea, too: that out of repetition, new ideas emerge. That goes for Thomas Edison as well. He had a few basic ideas and he repeated them, combined them and came up with more sophisticated uses for them. Literally.”

The reference to Edison is not coincidental. Stein’s narrative offers the Faust legend with a historical twist: Dr. Faustus as the inventor of the light bulb.

“Stein’s insight--into both the Faust legend and the 20th Century--is very profound,” Kaplan said. “You see, the light bulb was a different kind of machine than had ever been invented and represented a whole different attitude towards what a machine could do.

“Previously, machines duplicated the work that a man did: weaving cloth, digging, pumping water. But a light bulb does something no man could do--make light. It’s presumptuous. There was real speculation that Edison was in league with the Devil, that whole Wizard of Menlo Park mythology.

“In a way, that idea--that a machine does something no man can do--is the beginning of the 20th Century and developing technology. It really fits into the Faustian legend, where the idea is that the Devil gives you what you want, and you want more and more. Eventually, he has possession of your soul. And if you think of it in terms of nuclear power, it really is a Faustian bargain.”

Yet Kaplan has provided more than a dose of fun, including singing lightbulbs, a corps de ballet and the appearance of Stein herself.

“It occurred to me that she’s the hostess (a role Stein played in real-life), and how appropriate it would be for her to be Gertrude! I also wanted her to sing bass, and I know someone (a man) who looks like her . . . But the show will not be a Gertie joke,” Kaplan stressed.

“Gertrude Stein was a great, playful person, in her writing and in the way she was. And Faust has always been done as such a sturm und drang thing, Goethe and Marlowe. Hers is a much more charming treatment of it. You can talk about profound ideas and not hit everyone over the head with it.”

It’s a balance Kaplan has often put to play in his work, beginning with his initial directorial outings in high school (“I was interested in art, theater, history, literature--and on a much more basic level, gossip: I loved to tell stories”).

Studies at Clark University and Yale Graduate School followed, and Kaplan has since gone on to directorial (and adaptational) successes: last year’s local production of “The Circus of Dr.Lao”; a current Ruth Draper piece, “Cast of Characters,” playing in New York; a compilation of the works of Eudora Welty, “Sister and Miss Lexie,” in Chicago.

Yet whether in work or in life, it is the spirit of play and naivete that most engages him. “Take Chagall: I love him, but I used to think he was only suitable for Hanukkah cards. What a stupid thing to say! He’s so sophisticated in his joy and pleasure--he doesn’t have to prove anything.

“That’s how I feel about ‘Dr. Faustus,’ ” he said, smiling. “You think it’s dumb that I have girls dress up as giant light bulbs? It is dumb. And it’s wonderful.”