Faustus: A Play
The father of a young son, a philosopher who has spent his life seeking to uncover the inner workings and meaning of the universe encounters a mysterious magus who challenges him to choose between the pride of intellect and the subjection of familial love, in a contemporary new version of the classic tragedy of Dr. Faustus. Original. 12,500 first printing.
Read More
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.Mamet’s Faustus—like Marlowe’s and Goethe’s before him—is a philosopher whose life’s 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 conman’s patter. A meditation on reason and folly, fathers and sons, and a breathtaking display of magic both literal and theatrical, Faustus is a triumph.
Read Less