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"Wittenberg' at the Arden (1st review)
Robert Zaller
Stop the presses! Earth moves!
ROBERT ZALLER
What do Martin Luther, founder of the Protestant Reformation, Johann (John to you) Faustus, the 16th-Century magus and character model for Christopher Marlowe’s The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus, and Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, have in common?
Answer: the German university city of Wittenberg.
Luther taught in Wittenberg and nailed his Ninety-Five Theses to its cathedral church door. Faustus, according to Marlowe, studied and practiced his black arts there. Hamlet, too, was a student of Wittenberg in Shakespeare’s drama.
Why not put them all together, stir a bit, and see if a play comes out of it? Such is the idea behind David Davalos’s Wittenberg, now receiving its world premiere production at the Arden.
The result is an intermittently amusing pastiche, largely carried by Scott Greer’s bravura performance as Faustus. Davalos means to pit Luther (Greg Wood) against Faustus— the former is, or would be, his confessor and spiritual guide; the latter is Luther’s personal physician and would-be heresiarch. Both are in competition for the soul, and in Faustus’s case the patronage, of Hamlet (Shawn Fagan), brilliant philosophy student, sometime tennis player and heir apparent to an important European throne.
Faustus as secular humanist
Faustus gets most of the good lines and the lion’s share, certainly, of Davalos’s sympathies. He’s a bit of a quack and a good deal of a scamp, not to mention a stand-up comic and night club performer, but under the smart-aleck wit there beats the Christopher Hitchens-like heart of a secular humanist. In the play’s scanty plot, he’s procured an advance copy of the Copernicus treatise On the Revolution of the Heavenly Spheres, with its literally earth-shaking suggestion that our favorite planet orbits the sun and not the other way around. This, he thinks, is just the thing to turn his friend Luther, on the cusp of rebellion against the Catholic Church, into a revolutionary firebrand.
Luther, tempted but scandalized, will do what a still-loyal son of the Church should do with dangerous literature, but Faustus, in possession of the Ninety-Five Theses, sets in motion the events of the Reformation, and with it the career of modernity. As for Hamlet, first the protégé of one mentor and then of another, a letter arrives from Denmark that will divert him permanently from his studies. History marches on as it must, and Faustus’s cabaret closes shop. Revolutions do not enjoy satire.
Tom Stoppard minus one critical ingredient
Wittenberg is, or aspires to be, a play of ideas in the manner of Tom Stoppard, but intellectual tension is lacking. Luther scolds Faustus and sermonizes his flock, but his defense of Biblical inerrancy doesn’t play much above the Mason-Dixon Line, and his excited discovery that the just are saved by faith seems little more than a handhold for Faustus’s skepticism. Hamlet might perhaps mediate between the two, but he mostly speaks blank verse and quotes a lot of Shakespeare, which is funny once or twice but not as a running gag.
A fourth performer, Kate Udall, essays a variety of roles from Helen of Troy to the Virgin Mary in the generic guise of the Eternal Feminine; her function (except as Mary, of course) is to bring the other characters down to earth. This gives her some witty ripostes— and one scene stealing turn as Helen— but being a girl, nothing to contribute to the general argument. Faustus— part Timothy Leary, part Bob Dylan and part Ward Churchill— is the character we’re meant to take to heart, and Greer milks him for all he’s worth.
This play hasn’t happened along by accident. Read Pat Robertson and intelligent design for Martin Luther, and The Origin of Species for On the Revolution of the Heavenly Spheres, and you have the culture wars of our benighted present. Davalos is in a sense trying to update Inherit the Wind with Wittenberg, but his Luther is no William Jennings Bryan and his Faustus, amusing as he can be, isn’t a Clarence Darrow. Perhaps the larger problem—the problem we face with our born-again fellow citizens and their Frankenstein president— is that there isn’t really any dialogue to conduct.
To read another review by Lesley Valdes, click here.
To read another review by Steve Cohen, click here.
ROBERT ZALLER
What do Martin Luther, founder of the Protestant Reformation, Johann (John to you) Faustus, the 16th-Century magus and character model for Christopher Marlowe’s The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus, and Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, have in common?
Answer: the German university city of Wittenberg.
Luther taught in Wittenberg and nailed his Ninety-Five Theses to its cathedral church door. Faustus, according to Marlowe, studied and practiced his black arts there. Hamlet, too, was a student of Wittenberg in Shakespeare’s drama.
Why not put them all together, stir a bit, and see if a play comes out of it? Such is the idea behind David Davalos’s Wittenberg, now receiving its world premiere production at the Arden.
The result is an intermittently amusing pastiche, largely carried by Scott Greer’s bravura performance as Faustus. Davalos means to pit Luther (Greg Wood) against Faustus— the former is, or would be, his confessor and spiritual guide; the latter is Luther’s personal physician and would-be heresiarch. Both are in competition for the soul, and in Faustus’s case the patronage, of Hamlet (Shawn Fagan), brilliant philosophy student, sometime tennis player and heir apparent to an important European throne.
Faustus as secular humanist
Faustus gets most of the good lines and the lion’s share, certainly, of Davalos’s sympathies. He’s a bit of a quack and a good deal of a scamp, not to mention a stand-up comic and night club performer, but under the smart-aleck wit there beats the Christopher Hitchens-like heart of a secular humanist. In the play’s scanty plot, he’s procured an advance copy of the Copernicus treatise On the Revolution of the Heavenly Spheres, with its literally earth-shaking suggestion that our favorite planet orbits the sun and not the other way around. This, he thinks, is just the thing to turn his friend Luther, on the cusp of rebellion against the Catholic Church, into a revolutionary firebrand.
Luther, tempted but scandalized, will do what a still-loyal son of the Church should do with dangerous literature, but Faustus, in possession of the Ninety-Five Theses, sets in motion the events of the Reformation, and with it the career of modernity. As for Hamlet, first the protégé of one mentor and then of another, a letter arrives from Denmark that will divert him permanently from his studies. History marches on as it must, and Faustus’s cabaret closes shop. Revolutions do not enjoy satire.
Tom Stoppard minus one critical ingredient
Wittenberg is, or aspires to be, a play of ideas in the manner of Tom Stoppard, but intellectual tension is lacking. Luther scolds Faustus and sermonizes his flock, but his defense of Biblical inerrancy doesn’t play much above the Mason-Dixon Line, and his excited discovery that the just are saved by faith seems little more than a handhold for Faustus’s skepticism. Hamlet might perhaps mediate between the two, but he mostly speaks blank verse and quotes a lot of Shakespeare, which is funny once or twice but not as a running gag.
A fourth performer, Kate Udall, essays a variety of roles from Helen of Troy to the Virgin Mary in the generic guise of the Eternal Feminine; her function (except as Mary, of course) is to bring the other characters down to earth. This gives her some witty ripostes— and one scene stealing turn as Helen— but being a girl, nothing to contribute to the general argument. Faustus— part Timothy Leary, part Bob Dylan and part Ward Churchill— is the character we’re meant to take to heart, and Greer milks him for all he’s worth.
This play hasn’t happened along by accident. Read Pat Robertson and intelligent design for Martin Luther, and The Origin of Species for On the Revolution of the Heavenly Spheres, and you have the culture wars of our benighted present. Davalos is in a sense trying to update Inherit the Wind with Wittenberg, but his Luther is no William Jennings Bryan and his Faustus, amusing as he can be, isn’t a Clarence Darrow. Perhaps the larger problem—the problem we face with our born-again fellow citizens and their Frankenstein president— is that there isn’t really any dialogue to conduct.
To read another review by Lesley Valdes, click here.
To read another review by Steve Cohen, click here.
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