Winner: 2016 Big Easy Award for Best Director of a Play, Best Sound Design, Best Supporting Actor
Nominated: 2016 Big Easy Award for Best Play, Best Choreography
A ghoulish examination of the inextricable link between our fates and our ambition, this movement-based version of Marlowe's famous work takes place in Hell where Faustus, cemented to a moving platform like an unwitting chess piece, is forced to continually relive his downfall at the hands of demon machinist Mephistopheles.
"Faustus an Ambitious Take on Shakespeare Era Drama," Bruce Burgun, New Orleans Advocate.
"Under this daring director’s darkly scintillating vision, performances ignite and the cast jumps in with both feet."
"The action over the intermission-free 100-minute performance never wavers. Greene’s kaleidoscopic movement of his actors hypnotizes, creating some unforgettable stage images — none more terrifying than the birth from the underworld of Mephistopheles."
Greene attacks these scenes with the same bold, ritualistic “Night of the Living Dead” intensity as he does so effectively with all the rest. The summoning of the Seven Deadly Sins is composed with Pilobolus-like dexterity.
"Review: Faustus" Tyler Gilespie, New Orleans Gambit
This well directed and excellently performed production is both scary and thought provoking.
"Faustus as the Old Marquer Theater," from Trodding the Boards, Brian Sands, Ambush Magazine
Jon Greene, making a noteworthy New Orleans directorial debut, provides a visually & aurally stunning mise en scène and generally well-thought out adaptation of this grand, Elizabethan work.
Wisely cutting down Marlowe’s epic work to a manageable 95 minutes (and the title to just Faustus), Greene segues from scene to scene with a masterly fluidity, overcoming, for the most part, the static nature of the script which he enlivens with simple but magical stagecraft.
Greene has done something that few of our other local directors seem capable of doing—reinterpret a canonical work with a unique and potent vision.