Theater, not spoon-fed

A couple of years ago, actor Jude Law asked David Mamet to adapt Marlowe’s “Dr. Faustus” for the contemporary stage. The renowned playwright took a look at the 16th century text and decided instead to come up with his own version of the story.

“Why would an intelligent fellow sell his soul to the devil?” Mamet said recently on the stage at the Herbst Theatre. “I wanted to take that premise and make it work, so I wrote a new script. He didn’t like it.”

Law ended up performing Marlowe’s “Dr. Faustus” in London in 2002, while Mamet’s “Dr. Faustus” finally had its world premiere at the Magic Theatre here on Saturday.

The play, which Mamet also directed, opens as the wordy and self-important philosopher Faustus (David Rasche) has just finished his magnum opus explaining the way the world works. A friend stops by with a newspaper article complaining that Faustus hasn’t published anything lately.

“What is my charge but to tempt fate?” Faustus asks. “Do I vex you? Do I confound you?”

When Magus the magician (Dominic Hoffman) shows up to entertain the philosopher’s son, Faustus hands him the offending article.

“Make this foul indictment disappear,” he says.

The magician makes the article vanish, which sends the philosopher on a feverish quest for the secret of the trick that will ultimately cost him all that he holds dear.

“Faustus is having this running gag with his critics,” Mamet said. “I’m trying to amuse myself and the audience. It’s funny if you think selling your soul to the devil is funny.”

Mamet declined to be interviewed by The Times but he did sit down for a City Arts and Lectures Q&A; with radio commentator Michael Krasny at the Herbst in front of a sold-out audience.

“I stopped doing interviews because interviewers said, ‘You’ve been quoted as saying so and so’ and that’s pretty much all they said,” Mamet complained. “It wasn’t interesting for me.”

The play is Mamet’s first new theatrical work in more than five years, since “Boston Marriage” in 1999. And like that play, “Dr. Faustus” is told in an archaic diction, a convoluted syntax that could trip up even William F. Buckley Jr. But unlike Mamet’s earlier raw, caustic plays (“American Buffalo,” “Glengarry Glen Ross”), with their cascades of profanities, the new script doesn’t have a single word that’s unprintable, although many will be unfamiliar to modern readers.

“They praise me,” Faustus says in a typical passage, “as they praise the mother of the bride, to mask their own concupiscence. What is their praise, they are, as dolt schoolchildren bent over their sums, they round their inclusivities, into the most proximate low error. Their censure and applause are one. But th’extorted approbation of the mob. Crowds who cry up this slaughterer, that thief as great?”

Chris Smith, Magic artistic director, said that one of the things that excited him about the script was the almost Wagnerian nature of its leading role.

“The focus on language and debate is quite extraordinary,” he said. “It’s an incredibly difficult and challenging script to read on the page. It requires a real rigor to stay with it. All of the artists looking at the drafts said they had to go back to their dictionaries more than once.”

Mamet spent three weeks rehearsing the play in Santa Monica and a week up in San Francisco, refining his script all the time. “David the director is ruthless with David the playwright,” Smith said. “He was constantly cutting and revising, working for a real muscularity.”

“I think of the audience all the time,” Mamet said at the Herbst. “You learn to write a play by watching the audience night after night. There’s no other way.”

“If it doesn’t make sense to the audience there’s no point to it,” he added. “I’m terrified of misusing the audience’s attention. To waste one iota of that is bad manners and it’s bad theater.”

“Dr. Faustus” is certainly a demanding play -- of both the cast and the audience.

“It’s a herculean task,” Smith said. “It takes stamina, fortitude and grace to navigate this language. A lot of people expect staccato rhythms and four-letter words from David. This is more verse poetry.”

“The majority of the people come out with the potential of a cathartic experience and a real philosophical workout,” Smith added. “That may sound like the kiss of death but it’s just the opposite. It’s a reinvigoration. Like a great puzzle or detective story, as you start to piece things together once you get inside this wild rhetoric you feel empowered. You feel that step by step you’re going with their thrust and parry. It feels really good, but that’s not necessarily for everybody. It’s a different kind of fun.”

Or, as one person said walking out of a preview last week, “That made my head hurt.”

Critics, too, have been more admiring of Mamet’s ambition than his actual accomplishment. “It’s a play in which the author seeks to ground those heady problems in a tale of family love and betrayal,” noted the San Francisco Chronicle. “And it’s also Mamet’s attempt to create a whole new way of talking. It doesn’t succeed in any of those aims, but that doesn’t negate the fascination of watching a master fail in a risky, ambitious and occasionally rewarding attempt.”

Reviewers, moreover, have been unsure whether to blame Mamet the writer or Mamet the director for the play’s shortcomings.

“The legendary playwright seduces us with his facility for language but never finds the beating heart of the classical myth in this unsatisfying world premiere...,” said the San Jose Mercury News. “If the play overreaches its grasp, it’s still bewitching to watch a master craftsman test his limits with the form.”

Mamet seemed pleased with the work during his talk before the opening.

“I think the production is pretty good and the actors are great,” he said. “I’m trying to do the best I can, play by play. Sometimes you have to say, ‘This is a wacky idea but I’m not going to throw it out, I’m going to follow it.’ ”

Mamet, 56, lives in Los Angeles, where he has produced more screenplays than theater scripts in recent years. Both on stage (“Speed-the-Plow”) and on screen (“State and Main”) Mamet has skewed the film industry. He’s clearly a man who knows something about Faustian bargains.

“Does my work survive?” Faustus asks in the second act, after losing his family and stumbling into a dismal future but still consumed with the fate of his manuscript.

“But as a curio,” answers Magus.

“I was a whore,” Faustus says.

Then Magus, sounding as much like a studio executive as the devil, puts everything into perspective. “One must pay,” he says, “for entertainment.”