Ed Simon at Lit Hub:
My desire to write a cultural history of the Faust legend goes back a few years earlier than my pilgrimage to the Deptford churchyard, around the time that I attended an adaptation of the play entitled faustUS staged by the theater collective 404 Strand in my hometown of Pittsburgh. Basing the script on the shorter, so-called “Text A” of Marlowe’s play, a tauter and more cryptic work that cuts the slapstick that mars more traditional productions of Doctor Faustus, the performance was hallucinatory, ritualistic, psychedelic, incantatory. A work of conjuration. With the audience invited to sit in an ad hoc theater-in-the-round constructed on the stage of the Kelly Strayhorn Theater, we all faced a rusted iron-cage in which the action of the play would be set. I was in the front row.
My most distinctive memory of that performance was the actor who played Faust, shirtless and sinewy, glistening with sweat beneath the oppressive stage lights, hoisting a shaggy, bestial mask of a horn-twisted ox over his head, and wildly gesticulating to thrash metal so loud that my fillings were humming, the necromancer then taking a full loaf of white bread out of its antiseptic bag and shredding it into the gapping maw of the bovine mask, bits of spongy whiteness spraying onto all of us sitting in the front row.
more here.
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