Old Play in Manhattan

Faust, Part I (by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe), though one of the world's supreme classics, seldom reaches the New York stage; Hamburg's Deutsches Shauspielhaus production, done in German at the City Center, is the first in 32 years.

There is reason enough for this: Faust, in one way when done in German, in another in English, poses a language barrier not easily breached.* For non-Germans, again, even the playable but overlong first half creates theatrical problems not easily solved. No one word or phrase--dramatic poem, epic drama--adequately characterizes a work that, teeming with ideas and treading so much ground, cannot but be something of a patchwork.

Faust contains not just great lyrical speech, but ditties and doggerel, not just shadowy metaphysics but bright worldly wisdom, not just a welter of incident but a web of dreams, not just a prologue about stagefolk but another between the Devil and God. There are archangels along with procuresses, chunky peasants with symbolical wraiths, tavern songs and unearthly choruses, the kind of poem that gave Schubert Gretchen's spinning song, the kind of dialectic that prefigures Shaw's "Scene in Hell." It is among all this that Goethe propels his chief characters, Faust and his tempter-companion Mephistopheles, and that Goethe contrives his only real story, of Faust and the young Gretchen, whose seduction leads to madness and death. The Faustian quest makes for a whole kaleidoscope of moods, a whole panorama of settings. To the English-speaking world, Faust is best known, outside opera, in Marlowe's fitfully magnificent Dr. Faustus. But as Georg Brandes once noted, where Marlowe's Faust, loving power, craves omnipotence on earth, Goethe's, loving wisdom, seeks omniscience. Power inspires sharper drama than knowledge, particularly for those without the German to follow Faust's speculations and soliloquizings. Goethe's Mephistopheles, on the other hand, boasts some of the internationalism of Hell. Less fiend than cold-blooded mocker and cynic, he is full of wit and mischief, and Gustaf Gruendgens, who plays him nimbly enough, has the one role that can often make action as expressive as words.

The 20-scene production, shunning traditional grandiosities, keeps largely to a simple platform stage, at times with no more props than a bench and a tree, and often vivid expressionist lighting. The production suffers, however, from a total lack of style, from seeming solidly, even a little clumpingly, echt Deutsch. It may not seem too German for those who know German; for those who do not, Faust is more rewarding in Marlowe's play, or Berlioz' or Gounod's or even Boito's music. But, if not exactly something to see, as a great classic it may yet, perhaps, be something to have seen.

* At the City Center, English summaries via transistor radio are a broad but not specific help.

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