Lucifer Is My Co-Pilot
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

John Jesurun’s “Faust/How I Rose” will pitch even the strongest-stomached theatergoer, or the strongest souled, into metaphysical vertigo. Under the direction of Mexico City’s Martin Acosta, Mr. Jesurun’s play offers a wild riff on the legend of the man who sold his soul to the devil.
For the uninitiated (who should beware), Mr. Jesurun is an avant-gardist of long standing, the man responsible for the serial “Chang in a Void Moon” and other excursions into the surreal. Disjointed and allusive, his style relates closely to the well-made play – in approximately the same way a shredder relates to a cabinet full of old papers, or a baby chick to its egg.
At the BAM Harvey, Mr. Jesurun scrambles past, present, and future. Faust (Ari Brickman), in his version, is an international diplomat. His Mephistopheles, the tempting devil, is a female Lucifer. Monica Dionne plays Lucy with stern sensitivity in a long leather coat. So far this is familiar. But anyone who knows the legend from the Goethe play will be, at best, perplexed.
We meet Faust as he flies over a burning city. Then we meet his friend and confident, Phaedra (Guillermina Campuzano), who is an intellectual, and a mouse. Later he will participate in the murder trial of Gretchen, a.k.a. his assistant Rhonda Kindermoerd (Carolina Politti). She is accused of murdering her baby, but wins her freedom when the ghost of the baby takes control of the court stenographer and testifies in her defense. And we haven’t even gotten to the road trip to hell, or golfing in the thunderstorm. Free associative, willfully obscure, and sporadically captivating, Mr. Jesurun’s play smacks of “Fantastic Voyage” and an anxious seminarian’s dream.
There is almost no scenery on the stage of the BAM Harvey, where the show plays this week. (It was produced by the National Company of Mexico in 1998, and is staged here by Mr. Acosta’s Teatro de Arena company.) Mr.Jesurun, who is also the designer, uses a slightly raked stage and a giant screen that leans overhead. (The setup recalls Sarah Kane’s “4:48 Psychosis” at St. Ann’s Warehouse last month.) Bathing a stage and a company of actors in video is not an overwhelmingly novel approach to stagecraft. But Mr. Jesurun’s best images have a galvanizing appeal. They tend to show, or imply, elevation: lightning behind clouds, an escalator, the stars.
The text is similarly far-flung. Having seen the play, and read the script, and all the press materials thoughtfully assembled to accompany it, I still have only a fleeting sense of what “Faust/How I Rose” is about. Good luck decoding exchanges like this one:
“Baby Jesus … just arrived on a surfboard from Pearl Harbor.”
“I wish they all could be California girls. But they’ve turned into Nagasaki maidens.”
Lucifer provides the most compelling moments of the evening. (But he always does, doesn’t he?) According to Mr. Jesurun, Lucifer is the inventor of sensual pleasures, like fire, love, and surfing. Ms. Dionne quotes Beatles lyrics and flashes a dry sense of humor, as in this exasperated speech: “How do you like that? You invent love and get thrown out of heaven. So, okay it was a mistake. How did I know?”
Mr. Acosta directs his actors in all sorts of unexpected ways, shouting some lines and turning away from the audience for others. Mr. Jesurun’s use of live video provides a lift here and there. Lucifer’s assistant, Abdula (Manuel Dominguez), plops down on a chair in his dark coat and red wings. A video splashed across the floor looks like blue fire. (Actually it’s water, but ethereal just the same.) The fallen angel is tired of living and dying, living and dying, over and over for eternity, and so beseeches the heavens. “Why hast thou forsaken me?” Mr. Dominguez asks, arms raised as if on a cross. Just then, the screen behind him shows a live video feed from overhead, as if God were looking idly down.
These moments of grace come at a steep price. The show runs 90 minutes but feels much longer; it may be the densest piece to play the Harvey this side of the millennium. Unlike, say, Richard Foreman, whose reports from his obscure private universe somehow enliven, Mr. Jesurun’s play grows wearying. Like Faust’s doomed plane, it lacks the fuel to complete its journey.
***
Strong acting? No. Sharp writing? Not really. Captivating design? Yeah right. Whoopi Goldberg’s return to Broadway will not satisfy people who put much stock in those antique virtues. Ms. Goldberg’s show is designed to satisfy people who put stock in Ms. Goldberg.
Twenty years ago, Ms. Goldberg got her big break in a solo show on Broadway. Now here we are, in 2004, and the Dreadlocked One has become a massive celebrity. Time for an all-new show to reclaim her sway over Broadway? Not exactly. This iteration of the Whoopi show is an updated version of the original. Sometimes it’s very updated: The night I saw the show, she riffed on President Bush and Tony Blair meeting to discuss Arafat’s death, which had been in the papers that same day. Mostly it’s tired material, as she half-heartedly adopts different characters to riff on politics and life. One woman battles a sanitary napkin the size of a dashboard.
If it’s not clever jokes or dramatically convincing characters, what keeps her afloat? Charisma, mostly: Ms. Goldberg’s appeal is positively Clintonian. Onstage she makes the most of it. “Here’s how this is gonna work,” she says at the beginning of the show. “There’s no fourth wall here.”
She’s not kidding. The audience of the Lyceum gets its own lighting design. Do not doubt that Ms. Goldberg can see you as clearly as you can see her. This means do not come late. When two men had the audacity to do that the night I saw the show, she told them they could only do that in bed.
It’d be nice to see Ms. Goldberg work with a more capable writer, or a more skillful director (any director at all, in fact – one isn’t listed here). Better still, why doesn’t she pour all that energy and charisma, and that recurrent desire to tread the Broadway boards, into, you know, an actual play?
“Faust/How I Rose” until November 20 (651 Fulton Street, between Ashland and Rockwell Place, Brooklyn, 718-636-4100).
“Whoopi” (149 W. 45th Street, 212-239-6200).