Dr. Faustus

Christopher Shea, TimeOut Chicago

“In dim, claustrophobic quarters in the Chopin basement, Faustus fritters away his final hours bitching about his demon-servant Mephistopheles’s habit of peeping into the diary he’s filled with pointless hash marks.

At first glimpse, Maher’s fantastically unique two-man take on the Faust tale, An Apology for the Course and Outcome of Certain Events Delivered by Doctor John Faustus on This His Final Evening, is pretty No Exit. In true existential fashion, Faustus claims to be trapped in the present and unfettered by posterity or God. But his emphasis on the “now”—a word he repeats like a tic throughout the play—conflicts with the doctor’s leaps from the Stone Age (which he visits on a whim) to the present day, where he imparts his tale to a 2009 audience.

Maher builds a fascinating 80-minute monologue through this and other incompatible images: Trace, for example, the descriptions of Mephistopheles’s gaze, which Faustus loathes sometimes for its “infinite” superficiality and sometimes for its searing profundity. Faustus’s mangled rhetoric hints we can’t quite trust our narrator’s account.

Did we mention the play’s hilarious? O’Reilly, who created the role of Mephistopheles in Apology’s 1999 premiere, now plays Faustus to frantic perfection, utilizing his weathered baby face (here with comically dark circles under his eyes) to portray the quintessential academic, as frazzled as he is self-assured. His manic mocking of the silent, stone-still Mephistopheles (Shapiro)—the Donny to Faustus’s Dude—alone proves sidesplitting enough to make the evening unmissable.