Welcome to Hell: Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus at the Classic Stage Company

Laura Kolb, Ph.D.
(Baruch College)

Early in the Classic Stage Company’s production of Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, Mephistopheles makes his first appearance: an enormous headless body lurching into the Doctor’s study. Cement-gray and streaked with rust or slime, the apparition’s flexible outward skin is studded with faces frozen in pain: the gape-mouthed, wide-eyed masks of the damned. It’s like something out of Max Ernst’s The Spanish Physician: a body made up of other bodies, a thing both living and dead. Seeing it, Faustus (Chris Noth) cries out, “I charge thee to return and change thy shape,/ Thou art too ugly to attend on me.” On a recent Sunday afternoon, the line elicited a ripple of nervous laughter from the theater audience—laughter that sharply increased when Mephistopheles (Zach Grenier) reentered, now an ordinary man in a brown coat. Considerably shorter than Noth’s stately Faustus, this more unassuming Mephistopheles fussily carried a little folding stool on which he proceeded to sit, forearms resting on legs, ready to have a chat.

Doctor Faustus famously intersperses high tragedy with low comedy. The choice to play the crucial moment of Mephistopheles’ entrance simultaneously for horror and laughs epitomizes CSC’s bold, intelligent, hyper-theatrical interpretation, which takes Faustus’s formal structure—the basic pattern of a serious scene followed by a parodic replay—and makes it the principle of each dramatic moment’s construction. As members of the audience, we find ourselves frequently…