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An Apology for the Course & Outcome of Certain Events Delivered by Doctor John Faustus on this His Final Evening

By John Beer

 

The fall of 2009 saw something of an apotheosis for Chicago theater. Following in the wake of Tracy Letts’s Pulitzer-winning August: Osage County—an epic family drama in the grand American tradition of O’Neill, Miller and Williams—a pair of plays set in Chicago’s Uptown neighborhood opened in Times Square. Keith Huff’s A Steady Rain, a generic police procedural enlivened by the Hollywood wattage of Daniel Craig and Hugh Jackman, currently occupies a Manhattan theater across the street from Letts’s latest work, Superior Donuts, an updated Chico and the Man set in a Sheridan Avenue donut shop. Meanwhile, Chicago-based director David Cromer continued his string of restagings of American classics: his accolade-laden Our Town, still drawing an audience Off-Broadway after almost a year, was followed by a production of Neil Simon’s Brighton Beach Memoirs. Though the latter suffered a premature death, the blow was softened by news of Cromer’s forthcoming version of William Inge’s Picnic. The phenomenon even caught the attention of Time magazine, which recently declared a Chicago pedigree de rigueur for straight—i.e. non-musical—plays hoping to hit Broadway. (Less happily, Time’s Richard Zoglin construed the “straight” in “straight play” in true lunk-headed fashion, attributing Chicago’s success in part to a dearth of heterosexual playwrights in New York.)

While this attention is welcome, it nonetheless helps reinforce some timeworn stereotypes about the city’s theater. As epitomized by Steppenwolf Theatre Company (Letts is an ensemble member), Chicago stages play host to gritty, naturalistic, actor-driven drama. Even the highly stylized work of David Mamet, the scene’s ultimate success story, eschews the cerebral traditions of modern European theater—Pirandello, Ionesco, or for that matter Tom Stoppard—in favor of profane confrontations among street-smart, physically active loudmouths.
But another strand of Chicago’s theatrical tradition, more aesthetically adventurous, blends the populist energy of the storefront scene with the kind of sardonic and omnivorous intellectuality associated with such University of Chicago offshoots as the Compass Theater and Second City. Moving nomadically from loft space to café a step or two ahead of the onslaught of gentrification, this fringe tradition has given rise to a number of redoubtable troupes and gifted performers. Few companies, though, can boast the record of accomplishment and lunatic invention enjoyed by Theater Oobleck, initially formed by fellow students at the University of Michigan and notable for its egalitarian no-director policy and longtime practice of pay-what-you-can pricing. Oobleck is now in its twenty-first year of producing adaptations of Lacan (2006′s The Purloined Letter), scabrous satires of the Committee on Social Thought (last summer’s Strauss at Midnight) and the prolix, teasing work of Mickle Maher, one of the finest playwrights at work anywhere today.

Audiences last fall had the rare opportunity of seeing Maher’s 1999 An Apology for the Course & Outcome of Certain Events Delivered by Doctor John Faustus on This His Final Evening in a tenth anniversary production. The piece, a monologue delivered by the legendary doctor under the titular circumstances and witnessed by a silently malevolent Mephistopheles, displays many of the hallmarks of Maher’s writing. Blending lyrical melancholy with sharply absurdist wit, the play hunts avidly after the conditions of significant action and utterance even as it toys with the possibility that none exist. The play’s central conceit concerns the diary that Faustus has kept during the decades of his infernal bargain; madly, in order to thwart the demon’s interest in reading his most intimate thoughts, the doctor has resorted to inscribing nothing but random groupings of hatch-marks in his book. In the course of simultaneously justifying and decrying his innovative solution, Faustus recounts the clownish interactions between himself and Mephistopheles, meditates on the nature of evil and memory, and dreamily recollects the strange vistas that his contract has afforded him:

Back a hundred millennia. When language was ridiculously complex, when it still hadn’t stripped itself down to the bland, serviceable thing it’s become in our centuries. When tribes in imitation of the slowly advancing glaciers surrounding them spoke a language of only one word, a million syllables long, whose utterance began at birth, improvisationally, with the first syllables and ended at death with the last. A whole lifetime huddled on the ice, speaking—just once—a meaningless word. Meaningless: there was only the one word, no others to define it. And if there had been a definition, who could’ve lived long enough to speak it? Faustus was there. He heard nonsense spoken as a life-duty. A commitment to nonsense one million syllables long.