Daniel Herskovits’s Target Margin Theater has difficult taste – both a taste for the difficult and a taste that occasionally seems deliberately exclusive. Projects don’t come much headier: Recently, they’ve produced a 19th-century “St. Joan” that watches Joan mumbling at her spinning wheel as well as a three-part, full adaptation of Goethe’s “Faust.”

This latter project has reached its second stage, and “Faust in Love,” now at the Ohio Theater, applies a cool compress of high stylization to Goethe’s most fevered passages. It’s a good mix, the operatic passions and Mr. Herskovits’s amused theatrical distance. If the piece occasionally unties from itself, rescue arrives in a surprisingly moving finale and a subtle, nearly subliminal, score. For those who don’t know “Faust” inside and out, never fear. The central section, which takes places after Faust’s bargain with the devil has already been made, is by far the most accessible.

We first meet Faust (George Hannah) in his plaid pajamas – when you’ve got the formidable powers of hell on your side, you don’t have to dress for work. These are the best days of his “bargain,” when whatever he desires his demonic tempter will obtain. He orders Mephistopheles (David Greenspan) to get him Gretchen (Eunice Wong), a 14-year-old virgin, still stainless in the eyes of the Lord. After breaching her defenses with gifts of jewelry, Mephisto delivers the prize, and Faust and Gretchen seem happy in love.

The fall is swift. Before long, Gretchen is pregnant, drugging her mother to escape censure, and watching her family members die off one by one. While Faust and Mephistopheles are out partying at a Witches’ Sabbath, Gretchen awaits the executioner in her jail cell, driven there by crimes of desperation and love. Faust tries to save her, but Gretchen’s salvation has now become a concern of a higher order.

The production’s effects are nakedly displayed. Cast members hold mirrors disdainfully before Gretchen, wagons loaded with scenery are rolled backward while actors still stand on them. Carol Bailey and Susan Barras’s set involves a series of curtains, swished aside to show ever larger, ever blanker spaces. It could seem very bare bones, but there’s a lot of humor to be squeezed out of a garden backdrop that looks like a nauseatingly sappy painting by Thomas Kinkade.

Mr. Herskovits’s techniques only work sporadically. The piece can feel longer than it is, and in Mr. Hannah’s case the performance falls between the stools of Brechtian deadpan and badly realized emotion. Because of it, this is a “Faust” without a Faust – the devil might as well have been tempting Gretchen directly for all the dramatic weight our antihero takes on his back.

Luckily, Mr. Herskovits succumbs to his own temptations, bringing back David Greenspan as the arch Archdevil. Forget the apples hanging from the ceiling; Mr. Greenspan’s combination of Travolta strut and serpent’s slither is the real forbidden fruit. He moves sensuously, strokes his lapels, or taps Faust affectionately on the nose. Even the margins of his performance announce his bored superiority – his eyes are dead, his thoughts are elsewhere. There are millions of jobs for a busy devil, after all.

Matching him nicely is Nicole Halmos as Martha, the sex-starved friend of Gretchen who hasn’t met a man or demon she couldn’t hit on. Though Kaye Voyce’s costumes are occasionally a bit predictable (has there been a Devil recently who didn’t wear a white suit?), she does brilliantly by Ms. Halmos. Dressed in frilly red socks, grandma sandals, and deep decolletage, Martha can make even the Devil flinch.

The production’s triumph lies in its sound. Designed by John Collins (of both Wooster Group and Elevator Repair Service), with songs by John King, the sound is dense with barely heard scratchings and a plaintive wail that never quite goes away. It has its humor – a great 1970s groove is available whenever Mephistopheles wants it. But when Faust finally gets his girl, a melody that seems to be playing from the street in front of the theater comes sweeping up the stairs to hover right over the lovers’ heads.

This is sound (design) as fury – a winged, angry, persistent creature, who haunts us long after the deed is done.

Until April 30 (66 Wooster Street at Broome, 212-352-3101).