DOCTOR FAUSTUS
An archetype for the expansive Elizabethan era, Dr. John Faustus is the ultimate Machiavellian overreacher; he’s the intellectual equivalent of Drake and Cortez, arrogantly refusing to accept that human achievement or individual glory has bounds. Surely another motivation is Faustus’s barely concealed atheism, which mirrors Marlowe’s own; Faustus is blind to the devil’s power because he doesn’t believe in an afterlife. Both beneficiary and victim of his insatiable aspirations, Faustus sells his immortal soul to Mephistophilis for 24 years of often childishly abused omnipotence.
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Though clear and cogent, the performances in Tom Mula’s dutiful open-air staging are, with the exception of Johnny Lee Davenport’s imposing and relentless Mephistophilis, less exciting than the effects. (Let’s hope that Davenport, who recently played Lucifer in Court Theatre’s The Mystery Cycle: Creation, will break loose from this kind of role.)
