The Tragedy of Doctor Faustus

SPAM FILTER Krall’s production is past its shelf life.

In Marlowe’s classic Elizabethan drama, the ambitious Wittenberg scholar signs over his soul to the devil in exchange for dark powers and forbidden knowledge (spoiler alert: It does not end well). In a program note for this second production from the Resonants (formed by a group of recent Loyola grads), director Krall assures us—after some rambling about duality and the intermingling of good and evil—that this “isn’t your college professor’s Marlowe.” Which means, we guess, that he intends to clear away academic mustiness and offer a lively, contemporary interpretation instead.

In his modern-dress production, however, this translates into a bunch of half-formed, clumsily executed ideas that have little going for them except the cast’s admirable sincerity. The demon Mephistopheles—played by Alden as a trench-coated femme fatale—shares a romantic kiss with her human charge. The famous scene in which the spirit of Helen of Troy is conjured ends with Faustus smothering her to death (which seems a bit redundant seeing as how she’s already dead).

Meanwhile, the qualities that make the play dramatically interesting go undernourished. The actors speak Marlowe’s verse as if it were prose, stripping it of its grandeur and incantatory power. And the black-magic scenes couldn’t be handled in more hackneyed fashion, with hissing, writhing demons bathed in red light. It’s not your college professor’s Marlowe, all right; it’s your college senior’s.

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