The devil’s not in the details
WHAT’S Chris Noth thinking in “Doctor Faustus”? Hard to tell. As the ambitious magician of Christopher Marlowe’s 16thcentury play — who trades his soul to Lucifer in exchange for absolute power — the handsome Noth barely registers the enormity of the situation. When Faustus uses his own blood to seal the deal with Lucifer’s envoy, Mephistopheles, he might as well be paying the bill at Balthazar. At least Mephistopheles holds up his end of the
theatri cal bargain, played as he is by the expert Zach Grenier.
Grenier has a grand time portraying the deliciously villainous lawyer David Lee on “The Good Wife,” though he doesn’t share scenes with Noth’s Peter Florrick on that series. But here he nicely underplays Mephistopheles as a deceptively meek bureaucrat.
That’s the only subtle aspect in Classic Stage Company’s production of Marlowe’s bizarre hybrid of metaphysics and buffoonery. Using elements from both versions of the play, this new adaptation by David Bridel and director Andrei Belgrader swerves between thoughtful monologues and comedy so broad that you could run a horsedrawn cart through it.
While this show embraces both the play’s high and low points, it doesn’t deliver either extreme very well. Only Grenier looks at ease with the serious stuff, while the comedy, which relies way too much on cheesy audience participation, doesn’t go far enough.
Nothing against fart jokes or a man (Walker Jones) slathering his face with a cream doughnut — vanilla, by the looks of it. But for that to land, the direction and acting need more looseness, more inventive chaos.
That bit with the doughnut, by the way, is meant to illustrate gluttony as part of a Seven Deadly Sins pageant presented by Lucifer (Jeffrey Binder). Faustus looks unimpressed, and you can’t blame him.