Faustus: A Play

Having put his personal stamp on the contemporary theater, David Mamet now performs the supremely audacious feat of reinventing the theater of the past. He does so by telling his own ingenious and eerily moving version of the tragedy of Dr. Faustus.

Mamets Faustuslike Marlowes and Goethes before himis a philosopher whose lifes work has been the pursuit of the secret engine of the world. He is also the distracted father of a small, adoring son. Out of the clash between love and intellect and the fatal operation of Faustus pride, Mamet fashions a work that is at once caustic and heart-wrenching and whose resplendent language marries metaphysics to conmans patter. A meditation on reason and folly, fathers and sons, and a breathtaking display of magic both literal and theatrical, Faustus is a triumph.