Faustus - Acting Edition [Paperback]

David Mamet (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 13, 2007

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.

--This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“No modern playwright has been bolder or more brilliant.” —The New Yorker

“Pinter, Albee, Miller. They’re all looking over Mamet’s shoulder.” —New York --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

About the Author

David Mamet was born in Chicago in 1947. He studied at Goddard College in Vermont and at the Neighborhood Playhouse School of Theater in New York. He has taught at Goddard College, the Yale Drama School, and New York University, and lectures at the Atlantic Theater Company, of which he is a founding member. He is the author of the plays The Cryptogram, Oleanna, Speed-the-Plow, Glengarry Glen Ross, American Buffalo, and Sexual Perversity in Chicago. He has also written screenplays for such films as House of Games and the Oscar-nominated The Verdict, as well as The Spanish Prisoner, The Winslow Boy, and Wag the Dog. His plays have won the Pulitzer Prize and the Obie Award. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 72 pages
• Publisher: Dramatists Play Service, Inc. (July 13, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0822221292
• ISBN-13: 978-0822221296
• Product Dimensions: 7.5 x 5.1 x 0.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #557,781 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4.0 out of 5 stars Didn't know what to expect, June 17, 2011

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Bmacneel - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Faustus - Acting Edition (Paperback)

I was a little apprehensive at first to push through the first few pages or so. I knew Mamet was a screenplay writer so when I saw the language this was written in I thought it was some lame attempt at 17th century English with no real literary merit. However, I was pleasantly surprised by the characters and plot. The character of Faustus provided insight on our busy world. With his son's sickness at hand, Faustus shews away his hysterical wife in order to continue working on his math theories. He is more caught up in hearing what the scientific community has to say about him, then his family falling apart. Finally his self-serving ways steer him into his inevitable downfall. Very well written. Push through the language and know that it is not an arrogant attempt at something, but Mamet's way of shaping the atmosphere and setting.

2.0 out of 5 stars Disappointing, July 10, 2010

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David Keymer "David Keymer" (Modesto CA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Faustus - Acting Edition (Paperback)

I read Faustus with high anticipation, but it disappointed -or rather, perplexed--me. My judgment is highly subjective -don't trust it alone--but in the first act, where, naturally, the playwright must catch the attention and support of the audience, I felt Mamet's prose didn't work. It was too elliptical. More `direct' would have worked better. The dialogue was too murky. It seemed to fight the plot, which is a condensation and radical reworking of the Faust story. In the second act, Faust's abandoned wife and son come back from the grave to accuse him: that act flowed better and it seemed to make more sense. All in all, I wouldn't inflict this play on an audience.

3 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Lastus, July 1, 2006

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Larry Dilg (Van Nuys, CA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Faustus (Paperback)

This was downright disappointing. Faust usually leaves me cold, but at least Goethe's play, despite the tedious length and language, had some meat to it. By stripping it down, Mamet destroys both flesh and bones. The pretentious language telegraphs a con game that has no substance except guilt for ambition, ego, and neglect of wife and child. An actor of tremendous charm might make us care about these things, but since we seldom see the wife and never see the child, we mainly know about them from our imagination. They seem just one more trick of the protagonist's narcissistic mind. One imagines some magic in the theater that temporarily distracts the audience, but on the page the illusions are wispy indeed. The snap and crackle of Mamet's contemporary plays lose all pop in this timeless, placeless epic. It's too much of nothing.