A new short play draws some of its inspiration from Orson Welles’ production of The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus for the Federal Theater Project in early 1937
The play, Another Part of the Green Room, was written by Debra Fried and will be performed at the Red Bull Theater’s Short New Play Festival 2022 in New York City. The festival takes place at The Sheen Center for Thought & Culture on 18 Bleecker Street on July 11.
Fried, a classic film enthusiast, taught English and American poetry and literature at Cornell University for 35 years and lives in Ithaca, New York. She studied English and the classics at Bryn Mawr and Yale, where she obtained her doctorate.
Her offering is one of eight 10-minute plays will have their world premiere at the Short New Play Festival.
In Another Part of the Green Room, Welles in the figure of Mercury, finds a trio of Elizabethan actors who have magically transformed into the very roles they play (within the play) in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and recruits them for his 1937 Mercury Theatre production of Faustus.
Opening on January 8, 1937 at the Maxine Elliott Theatre in New York, Faustus was the third of four stage productions Welles would direct under the Works Progress Administration. Previously, Welles had helmed “Voodoo” Macbeth and Horse Eats Hat for the WPA.
Faustus was an early instance of racially integrated casting. Jack Carter, whose elegant and austere Mephistopheles contrasted mightily with the explosive Faustus of Welles, had starred as Macbeth in “Voodoo” Macbeth.
Christopher Marlowe’s rarely staged Elizabethan play was, artistically, one of the most notable productions in the history of the American theater.
Welles’s highly innovative use of costumes, lighting, and a series of trapdoors resulted in a production in which the sense of black magic and damnation was all-pervasive.
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