Glengarry Glen Park
Mamet's Dr.Faustus slumbers at the Magic Theatre.

By Robert Avila

SET IN A timeless scene with a strong 17th-century locution on the loose in it, David Mamet's version of the Faust legend catches the title character (David Rasche) on a double-celebration day: it's the birthday of his adoring son (Benjamin Beecroft and Nathan Wexler) and the day of the triumphant completion of his long-awaited magnum opus, a work that claims to have reduced all of human nature to a mathematical equation. (What a Poindexter – and I'm thinking as much of the admiral: folding all that nerdy efficiency and ingenuity into a warped, sinister pact with absolute power.) To Dr. Faustus science is all, and fame its due. By contrast, he likens the comfort afforded by religion to a glass of chamomile tea (amusingly enough and much to the distress of his pious friend Fabian, a likable Colin Stinton). As a father, Faustus is of a Ptolemaic bent, reading everything from his precocious son's poem (a barely veiled plea for paternal attention) in terms of the natural gravitational force that holds the son in an orbit around the father. In short, Big Daddy is one self-absorbed, impertinent brain stem heading for a fall. Enter traveling magician Magus (an able and understated Dominic Hoffman), a little hocus-pocus, and a philosophical tête-à-tête at the gates of hell.

Sounds kind of cool when I read it back, but in fact Dr. Faustus amounts to so great a departure into an obsessive formalism that it leaves its familiar but alluring themes and the playwright's usual strengths registering only dimly on the horizon. Meanwhile, the consistently overwrought dialogue sits weightily in the foreground, casting a chilly shadow over an eager but bemused audience. It often has the feel of an exercise, like translating old saws and commonplaces into Elizabethan, or just highfalutin, as when Faustus smugly sums up the military mind as being "in constant preparation to refight the war just past."

It doesn't help either that the cast seems, on the whole, only slightly more comfortable with the material, or that the action on stage is so terribly static – although it's hard to imagine this script working very well under any circumstances. One wonders how much better the scenes would run if they were staged back on Earth. Then at least it would be possible to chew on the dramatic content a little instead of merely panting for air. As is, Faustus's greatest sin seems to be logorrhea rather than pride.

The highest-stakes philosophical showdown between Faustus and the devil that forms the crux of the play's action also works best dramatically, but even here the language and a sense of inertia make it difficult not to drift away from what should be riveting. When the argument comes to a jarringly abrupt close, it feels as if the playwright lost interest, packed up, and went home.

Which is all the more disappointing since Mamet's devastating ability to distill society's deepest contradictions in the implosions of petty crooks and antiheroes makes one gleeful at the thought of his tackling the archetype of modernity itself, of Goethe meeting Bobby Gould in hell. But even more: Faustus is the scientific age personified, a heroic figure whose pride gets the better of him. Even before his comeuppance we can see him as a pathetically detached character, oblivious of real life and its significance. His awesome stride exudes confidence, but he leaves ruin and waste in his wake. In short, he's hella apt.

Just as the height of the 1940s terror inspired Thomas Mann's famous treatment, this era of crisis evokes the Faust legend with rare urgency. After all, it comes as hardly a wonder if millions replace Popular Mechanics with the Book of Revelation beside their own imperial thrones. When mechanical progress has far outstripped progress in human relations – offering us a parade of petty conquerors toting H-bombs, robber barons wielding the International Monetary Fund, and industrialists unsettling the very seasons to extract unprecedented wealth for the powerful – who can blame millennialists for reading the writing on the wall?

'Dr. Faustus' runs through April 4. Tues.-Sat., 8:30 p.m.; Sun., 2:30 p.m., Magic Theatre, Fort Mason Center, Bldg. D, Marina at Laguna, S.F. $25-$53. (415) 441-8822, www.magictheatre.org.