Playwright David Mamet crafts head-scratching adaptation of 'Dr. Faustus'

SAN FRANCISCO — Who is David Mamet, anyway?

The author of riveting dramas in which modern characters speak of deep matters in a profane, hauntingly circuitous original patois?

A filmmaker increasingly enamored of action-thriller plots — as in his just-released political caper, "Spartan"?

Is Mamet a cranky, theatrical theorist and smug debunker of Method acting? A terse writer of fiction? A connoisseur and collector of card tricks and mind games? A devout scholar of sacred Jewish texts? (He just co-wrote "Five Cities of Refuge," a book of reflections on the Torah, with Rabbi Lawrence Kushner.)

Mamet is all this and more, if you count his latest project: an adaptation of the theatrical classic "Dr. Faustus." It premiered to sold-out houses and head-scratching reviews at San Francisco's Magic Theatre in February, and it plays through April 18. It opens Off-Broadway next February, in a new staging by Neil Pepe at the Atlantic Theatre Company.

Mamet is surely one of the most eclectic, trend-averse thinker-artists of his generation. And, at times, one of the more inscrutable. Watching "Dr. Faustus," it's hard to believe this is the same guy who wrote so indelibly of small-time American dreamers and schemers in the punchy plays "Glengarry Glen Ross" and "American Buffalo," and the film "House of Games."

True, Mamet has adapted classic works before, including crisp English versions of several plays by Anton Chekhov. And many of his works are, in essence, about people who've already pawned their souls to the devil.

But "Dr. Faustus" is something of a puzzlement, more rhetorically and temperamentally attuned to the pitiless, Elizabethan-era "Dr. Faustus" of Christopher Marlowe than to Goethe's redemptive 19th-century "Faust," or Thomas Mann's reworking of "Faust" into a Nazi-era parable.

In Mamet's script, the ornately wrought language and meter can be enticingly cerebral ("The greater the intellect, the more ease in its misdirection") and nearly impenetrable. Most of the handpicked actors in the writer's own Magic Theatre staging have so much difficulty spitting out mouthfuls such as "the abrogation of commonalties" and "will you license me to express my deep horror, and my profound sense of occupation?" that the dynamic meanings of the lines often are pulverized.

Every version of "Faust" is about a devil's bargain that backfires on the mortal involved. But each version cooks up a different deal and a specific fate (tragic or merciful) for the one who dares to mess with Lucifer.

In Mamet's hourlong two-actor script, the "good doctor" is an arrogantly brilliant, 19th-century pedant who has just decoded existence through a philosophy of "mathematical perfection." (Don't ask me to explain it; I wonder if Mamet even can.)

This Faust (portrayed by one of Mamet's favorite stage actors, David Rasche) is also an inattentive father and husband. His wife (Sandra Lindquist) can't even get him to take a breather from headier concerns to look in on their little boy, who has fallen ill on his birthday.

Despite her repeated entreaties, Faust whiles away his time blistering at criticism from a friend (Colin Stinton), a newspaper column, and the devil himself (Dominic Hoffman) — thinly disguised as an itinerant magician.

Over a single, clotted scene, Faustus gets shuttled into his own murky hell. There, his son (who seemingly perished due to fatherly neglect) engages in a cool debate with him. His wraithlike, grieving wife wafts by to rave like a Hades-bound Lady Macbeth.

One is left, abruptly and unsatisfyingly, with a fable that's both verbally opaque and morally simplistic — at least on its word-gnarled surface.

Fame and worldly success account for nothing without selfless love — is that the big idea? And is that all there is?

In the Magic lobby, posted notes suggest a connection linking Mamet's play and the High Holy Days, specifically "The Days of Awe" — the period between Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur when Jews take stock of, and repent, their worldly sins.

"Dr. Faustus" closes with a similar sort of fearless inventory. But by then, there's the danger that a viewer's mind has become so glazed by Mamet's frigid dramatic exercise, that even the fires of hell can't heat up the denouement. At the Magic, the brain also is numbed by inert acting — with Rasche the worst offender, as he repeatedly stumbles over and drops his lines.

So should one write off "Dr. Faustus" as a Mamet clunker — made worse by the author's notorious reputation of being a poor director of his own works?

Not yet. Precisely because the Magic staging is so enervated, and the lead isn't depicted by a classically trained actor equipped to elucidate the verse (if that's possible), I'm not quite willing to dismiss "Dr. Faustus" yet.

The play may, eventually, prove to be just as baffling and chilly in other hands. But Mamet's earlier works "Oleanna" and "The Cryptogram" opened up to reveal swirling depths — after other directors got hold of them. Maybe Neil Pepe can turn the trick with this script.

Call me daft, but I can't help it: Though he's not especially user-friendly, I just always want to know more about what this wily, unsettling and stubbornly individualistic playwright is driving at.

Misha Berson: mberson@seattletimes.com