Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights


Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights is a libretto for an opera by the American modernist playwright and poet Gertrude Stein. The text has become a rite of passage for avant-garde theatre artists from the United States: La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club, Judson Poets' Theater, The Living Theatre, Richard Foreman, Robert Wilson, and The Wooster Group have all produced the piece.

Background

Stein wrote the piece during what critics often refer to as the final or narrative period of her playwriting career. From 1932 onwards, she had begun to rediscover and reintegrate stories into her dramatic writing, an element hitherto she had worked to exclude. In a letter to Carl Van Vechten, Stein identified her work on this piece as a breakthrough: "I have been struggling with this problem of dramatic narrative and in Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights I think I got it." Despite her newfound use for narrative, Stein did not, as scholar Betsy Alayne Ryan states, "leap foolishly into ordinary comprehensibility."
Lord Berners had adapted Stein's play They must. Be wedded. To their wife. into his choral ballet A Wedding Bouquet, and he commissioned a new text from her, intending to compose the music himself. She wrote Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights for Berners in 1938, but he was unable to write the score. In 1949 Virgil Thomson considered writing the music, but he was dissuaded by Alice B. Toklas, then Stein's literary executor.

Structure

The structure of action in Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights does not resemble that which is traditionally thought to constitute a play. The progressive development of a coherent plot that unfolds through the interaction between a configuration of figures is just discernible. These include Faustus’ relationship to Mephisto, Faustus and Marguerite Ida and Helena Annabel, and the pairings of minor characters. The text does not allow for a stable diagramming or coherent identities. Like the speech-headings in Elizabethan and Jacobean texts, Stein describes her characters in a number of different ways, suggesting some degree of multiplicity in her conception of dramatic character.
The play adopts a number of textual strategies that presuppose a relationship to performance, though it is performance conceived in a distinctly modernist way: as spatial meaning, self-referential, and unconstrained by any adherence to the conventions associated with traditional dramatic literature. Like Beckett, Stein is interested in an aesthetic of surfaces - of formal elements interacting in space - which do not serve the traditional purpose of the imitation of action. The aesthetic assumptions about performance embodied in Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights and the ambiguity in its textual composition produce elements unanchored from a referential process towards any reality other than its own occasion; it suggests a fully self-referential performance.

Plot

The piece opens with Faustus looking out from the doorway to his study, which streams with intense white light from beyond, when Mephisto appears:
Despite this opening, Stein proceeds to marginalize the Faustian struggle between good and evil within the breast of Man, which is traditionally played out through the relation between Faustus and Mephistopheles, in favour of a conflict between Faustus and "Marguerite Ida and Helena Annabel." In Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights, Stein - a highly-experimental modernist writer - dramatizes an archetypal modernist myth from the competing - and gendered - perspective of the multiple woman.

Staged productions

  • The libretto premiered as a play at Beaver College in 1951, at the launch of the college's theatre program.
  • Boston University LaMaMa performed Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights, directed by Maxine Klein and with music by Marilyn Pasekoff, at La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club in May 1972.
  • Judson Poets' Theater staged Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights October 26–November 19, 1979. Directed by Lawrence Kornfeld, Music: Al Carmines, Set: Edward Lazansky, Costumes: Theo Barnes, Lighting: Victor En Yu Tan, Musical Director: Michael Kelly. Cast: Jeff Weiss, Al Carmines, Zoelle Montgomery, Florence Tarlow, Nathaniel Bucknell, Stephen English, Aramis Estevez, Sarah Kornfeld, Jackie Beech, Essie Borden, Lou Bullock, Esteban Chalbaud, Wendell Cordtz, Craig Kuehl, Barbara Sandek, Maggie Wise. Stage Manager: Allison Peck, Assistant Director: Jason Buzas
  • The Yale School of Drama staged Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights in 2011 as a student directing thesis project.
  • The Yale University Theater Studies department staged Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights in 2019 as a senior project production for Ryan Seffinger and Emil Ernström.
  • The University of Pittsburgh Theatre Arts department staged Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights in 2019 as a lab production.
  • The University of Barcelona staged Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights in 2000 at the Grec Festival, translated to Catalan by Teresa Requena and directed by Pedro Gurrola.

Works cited