Faust Things First

Many things, including some audience members’ hackles, are bound to rise when John Jesurun’s Faust/How I Rose receives its New York unveiling as part of BAM’s Next Wave Festival this fall, in a production by Mexico City’s Teatro de Arena, staged by its artistic director, Martin Acosta. One performance (November 17) will be given entirely in Spanish, the rest in English—but that means John Jesurun’s English, so get your right brains ready for linguistic dislocations, from German to Spanish and back via our own tongue, the likes of which you’ve never experienced. Unless, that is, you’re familiar with Jesurun’s other works, like Number Minus One, Deep Sleep, Shatterhand Massacree, and the East Village’s favorite post-surrealist stage soap opera, Chang in a Void Moon.

Famous for fracturing space, time, and common sanity in his works as well as language, Jesurun once produced a piece that divided the audience literally as well as metaphorically: In Everything That Rises Must Converge, he sat cast members in two parallel rows, on opposite sides of a wall, facing two separate blocks of audience bleachers; the other half of the cast was visible on video monitors mounted above the wall. Not irrelevantly, the piece dealt with both teams trying to rescue a kidnapped translator (who showed up once, briefly, as a video image). Midway through the piece, the whole arrangement revolved, giving each half of the audience the other half of the live action. Such visual dislocations are certainly germane to the medieval tale of Faust, the elderly scholar who regains youth and power by selling his soul to the devil. Best known as the hero of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s sturm und drang epic drama, Faust has carried out his adventures—most notably his seduction of the innocent peasant girl Gretchen or Marguerite—and remorsefully faced his damnation through every form of theatrical art from grand opera to puppet play. Jesurun’s rendition, of which New York got a preview taste several years ago when a Builders Association piece employed excerpts from it, smashes all the barriers, leaping from high tragedy to coarse put-down and from grandest archaism to lowest contemporary slang. Born to a bilingual family in the Southwest, and German-speaking from his adolescent years on a U.S. military base, Jesurun may be the perfect writer to play the devil with our everyday cultural parameters, livening up our isolationist notion of Eurocentric dead-white-guys art with a good dash of Mexican salsa roja.

And what shakes up the aesthetic consciousness, of course, shakes up political awareness as well. The phrase Faustian bargain, meaning an unholy deal like the one in which the title character trades his eternal soul for superhuman power, is a standard-issue item in political journalism, applicable to everything from nuclear deterrence to electoral redistricting. If Jung described modern humanity as “in search of a soul,” Jesurun’s games with language, time, and narrative, you might say, are being played over the void where that invisible object used to reside. In a world where dogged materialism and literal-mindedness seem to rule, he offers an escape hatch that comes without obligations to technology, machinery, or the ostensibly solid realities that, as political life has recently been teaching us, can vanish overnight if someone’s in a mood to throw his power around. By the time Faust/How I Rose comes along, we’ll know if we’re in for four more years of devil’s deals or not; either way, our souls are likely to need the liberating lunacy of his verbal dance.

Faust/How I Rose by John Jesurun, November 16–20, BAM Harvey Theater, 651 Fulton Street, Brooklyn, 718.636.4100, bam.org

November 18, BAMdialogue with director Acosta and playwright Jesurun, BAM Rose Cinemas

Previews by Charles McNulty

RICHARD III

September 21-October 24

Public Theater, 425 Lafayette Street, 212.239.6200

The Station Agent may have made him a film star, but theater people have been long aware of Peter Dinklage’s big talent. Probably the shortest man (at 4-11) to ever play Shakespeare’s humpback villain, he’s likely to prove one of the most mesmerizing.

RECKLESS

Previews September 22, opens October 14

Biltmore Theatre, 261 West 47th Street, 212.246.4422

The ever fresh Mary-Louise Parker stars in the Broadway debut of Craig Lucas’s 1983 dark comedy about a woman whose life literally has her out on the window ledge. With Debra Monk and Rosie Perez on hand to enhance director Mark Brokaw’s dreamy ensemble.

NOBODY’S LUNCH

September 23-October 17

P.S.122, 150 First Avenue, 212.477.5288

The Civilians continue to pursue new forms of documentary theater with this oddball exposé of the politics of public information—a catchall that apparently includes everything from Homeland Security to Jessica Lynch.

AIN’T SUPPOSED TO DIE A NATURAL DEATH

September 29-October 31

HSA Theatre, 645 St. Nicholas Avenue, 212.868.4444

Classical Theater of Harlem’s fall season kicks off with a revival of Melvin Van Peeble’s Tony-nominated 1971 musical about the grit and groove of the ghetto street.

OTHELLO

October 5-10

BAM Harvey Theater, 651 Fulton Street, 718.636.4100

Never at a loss for breathing exuberant life into the classics, the English company Cheek by Jowl returns to BAM in a boundary-crossing co-production with France’s Théâtre du Nord. Declan Donnellan directs British actor Nonso Anozie’s critically hailed turn as the Moor of Venice.

LYSISTRATA

October 6-10

City Center, 135 West 55th Street, 212.581.1212

The National Theater of Greece returns to City Center with this staging of Aristophanes’ indestructible anti-war comedy in which women teach men the hard way (no booty!) about the foolishness of military adventurism. Performed in modern Greek, with English supertitles.

GOOD SAMARITANS

October 6-24

St. Ann’s Warehouse, 38 Water Street, Brooklyn, 718.254.8779

Richard Maxwell’s back with a new play, and this time it’s a love story between a rehabilitation counselor and a “blind hedonist.” In addition to a few new amorous songs by the droll downtown author, expect the usual deadpan delivery of dialogue that captures only too well our fumbling stabs at communication.

HECUBA

October 7-30

The Culture Project, 45 Bleecker Street, 212.253.9983

One of the fall season’s many excursions into ancient Greek wisdom on the widespread moral disintegration of war, this Euripides revival affords a rare opportunity to encounter voice and acting guru Kristin Linklater onstage.

EYES OF THE HEART

October 11-30

Intar 53, 508 West 53rd Street, 212.244.0447

The National Asian-American Theatre Company presents Catherine Filloux’s new drama (inspired by interviews the playwright conducted) about a Cambodian woman suffering from psychosomatic blindness linked to the witnessing of Khmer Rouge atrocities.

PEOPLE ARE WRONG!

Previews begin October 13

Vineyard Theatre, 108 East 15th Street, 212.353.3366

A co-production between the Vineyard and Target Margin, this new rock musical, directed by David Herskovits and featuring singer-songwriter John Flansburgh, has an old-fashioned premise: A New York couple experiences culture shock after moving to the country.

THE GOOD BODY

October 22-January 16

Booth Theatre, 222 West 45th Street, 212.239.6200

Vagina Monologues creator Eve Ensler riffs on the not necessarily genital aspects of the female figure (subject matter apparently runs the gamut from Botox to burkas), in a solo performance piece that marks Ensler’s Broadway debut.

4:48 PSYCHOSIS

October 26-31

St. Ann’s Warehouse, 38 Water Street, Brooklyn, 718.254.8779

The final play of the British playwright Sarah Kane, who committed suicide in 1999, makes its U.S. premiere, in this acclaimed Royal Court production.

THE PLAYBOY OF THE WESTERN WORLD

October 26-31

NYU’s Skirball Center for the Performing Arts, 566 LaGuardia Place, 212.992.8484

Saints be praised: The Abbey arrives from Dublin for a week-long run of Synge’s comic masterpiece, with artistic director Ben Barnes directing the theater’s mellifluous acting company.

HELL MEETS HENRY HALFWAY

November 3-21

Ohio Theatre, 66 Wooster Street, 212.966.4844

Pig Iron, Philadelphia’s intrepid movement-theater troupe, derives inspiration from Polish author Witold Gombrowicz’s novel Possessed, a feverish tale involving a mad prince trapped in a tower, an alchemist obsessed with body fluids, and a tennis player who’s merging identities with her coach.

DEATH AND THE PLOUGHMAN

November 3-December 12

Classic Stage Company, 136 East 13th Street, 212.677.4210

Obie-winning director Anne Bogart and her adventurous SITI company go on an imagistic journey via Johann van Saaz’s tale of a plowman who accosts Death for needlessly taking his wife.

NORA (A DOLL’S HOUSE)

November 9-13

BAM Harvey Theater, 651 Fulton Street, 718.636.4100

The much admired German auteur Thomas Ostermeier directs Anne Tismer in the title role of this 21st-century version of Ibsen’s A Doll House. A production from Berlin’s estimable Schaubühne theater.

THE BALTIMORE WALTZ

November 16-January 9

Peter Norton Space, Signature Theater, 555 West 42nd Street, 212.244.7529

Signature’s much anticipated Paula Vogel season includes the playwright’s 1992 Obie-winning drama, inspired by her relationship with her brother, who died from AIDS in 1988. Groundbreaking in its day, comically buoyant, and still heartbreaking.

A NUMBER

Previews begin November 16, opens December 7

New York Theatre Workshop, 79 East 4th Street, 212.460.5475

Sam Shepard, who stars in this new play by Caryl Churchill, has compared the work to Waiting for Godot. Need we say more?

THE CHAIRS

December 1-4

BAM Harvey Theater, 651 Fulton Street, 718.636.4100

Director David Gordon shares the stage with his wife Valda Setterfield in Ionesco’s death-haunted comedy of an elderly couple approaching their mutual end. Jennifer Tipton’s lighting, Michael Gordon’s score, and our own Michael Feingold’s new translation conspire in the absurd ebullience.

FRANKENSTEIN

December 9-January 8

Soho Rep, 46 Walker Street, 212.868.7444

The Flying Machine deploys its signature multimedia storytelling to Mary Shelley’s classic in a production that could mark the birth of 21st-century gothic.