Faustus: A Play

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 intell...