I’d like to begin by sharing with you my thoughts about what Ecce Faustus is not. By taking this via negative approach, I hope to establish some initial common ground, since I expect that a definitive assertion of what Ecce Faustus is will be much more subjective and agreement more elusive.
Ecce Faustus is not a play. Certainly not in the traditionally understood concept of the form. We have not attempted to re-tell an old tale in a new skin. Faustian tales are ubiquitous to the point of cliché. Who needs another one?
I also resist the too easy label of “experimental.” Ecce Faustus does not represent an experiment in theatrical form. Experiment implies testing of a hypothesis, playing with the nature of the form for any number of reasons: discontent, rebellion, spirit of innovation, whimsy.… We aren’t searching for something new. If anything we’re attempting to return something forgotten to a contemporary, technology-obsessed (consumed?) society. Ecce Faustus’ 24-scene form sprung from demand, not a desire to experiment.
Ecce Faustus is also not an attempt at pseudo-ritual theatre. There are, indeed, elements of ceremony, and roots into certain liturgies (particularly the requiem mass), but we are not concerned with parodying or aping established rites or naively proposing a new ritual.
Our intention has been to create the circumstances for an encounter with certain aspects of the Faustian archetype and the way that archetype resonates in our own human experience. Our impulses toward transgression, desire, power, and creation. Our willingness to sacrifice love, mercy, and compassion for fleeting temporal glory. And to question the possibility of redemption and forgiveness in the moment of profound regret. I think of Ecce Faustus as a vivisection of the manifestation in our lives of the Faustian spirit. Who among us has not sold their soul to someone? Who has not purchased the soul of another? Can those bargains ever really be undone?
I believe the best way to encounter Ecce Faustus as a spectator is through the lenses of poetry and music, rather than dramatic literature. I have sought a composition of allusion, metaphor, and subtle repetition. One that engages a dramaturgy of simultaneity as well as concatenation. Harmony and dissonance. As Zhenya has written, “the discourse or dialogue carry less import than the way the discourse and actions allow the audience to compare what is being described and presented to their own, inner experiences … to discern their own deep, inexpressible feelings and the reality of the inner psychological experience otherwise concealed by the flow of language and restrictions of narrative.”
The frame within which our encounter plays out is a very simple one, for which I’d like to share three examples:
- Near the end of the primary Faust source, the Faust Book (1587), Dr. Faustus invites his closest friends and colleagues to his home for a party on the eve of his destruction. At this party he confesses his sin and tells of his 24-year bargain with Mephistopheles. The next morning they find him dead.
- On January 24, 1947, “A Tete a Tete with Antonin Artaud” was scheduled for a small theatre in Paris. He had not performed in public since 1935, and no one had any idea what to expect. He began reciting poems, chants and incantations which made no sense. He screamed and howled, and shook uncontrollably. He spoke in detail about the electroshock treatment and abuses he endured in Rodez asylum. He lost all of his notes. Everything went terribly wrong. He experienced a major psychic crash before the packed theatre. It became a notorious disaster. It was his last public appearance and a year later he was dead.
- Late in Thomas Mann’s novel, Doctor Faustus, the composer Leverkuhn has gathered his friends together to play for them his final masterpiece, but instead launches into an illness-driven confession of his personal Faustian bargain; a tryst with a prostitute 24 years earlier, in which he engaged with the intent of contracting syphilis. The disease untreated would lead to madness, which would in turn stimulate creative genius. To his mind, the recent death of a beloved child, nicknamed Echo, was an inadvertent and terrible price he paid for the bargain. Before he can play a note of the music he collapses into a catatonic fit. He never speaks again and a few months later he dies.
Of all the Faustian literature, Mann’s novel is arguably the most influential to our Ecce Faustus. This last episode (along with the others) give us the basic structure within which to work; but also, that last work of the composer, Leverkuhn, is entitled The Lamentation of Doctor Faustus, and is itself a vivisection of the Faust narrative, and a merging of the ancient musical structure of the madrigal with a revolutionary 12-tone musical system that Mann borrowed from Schoenberg. Our aim was to create a polyphonic theatrical equivalent of Leverkuhn’s Lamentation, as detailed in the novel.
One last personal anecdote. As an undergraduate at Edinboro University of Pennsylvania in the late ’80s I encountered on the library shelves a strange, compelling book filled with fascinating and disturbing photographs. It purported to be a book about theatre, but these photos couldn’t possibly have been from plays. That could not be acting. They took possession of me, even though I was unable to make heads or tails of what the book was saying, with its descriptions of bizarre movement and voice work, and talk of the actor sacrificing himself, and making a Total Act. The book burned into me so much that I ended up stealing it. I still have it. That magical book was Towards a Poor Theatre by Jerzy Grotowski. In the summer of 1992, after a few years of working with his close collaborators, Zhenya and I served as workleaders in Jerzy Grotowski’s Objective Drama Research Program at UC/Irvine. There I encountered directly the source of my magic book, and that summer my trajectory in the theatre irrevocably changed.
1992. Four and Twenty immeasurable years. The duration of a Faustian bargain.
~ Joseph Lavy, Director
