Stage lights rise.

As if upon a gigantic pallet, the whole stage rotates. It turns Faustus study to the back and brings around the other half to reveal this new scene: another time, another place.

It is a plain in northern India, or so you may surmise, seeing elephants being bathed in a river distantly.

We are closest to one tent in a large encampment. The flaps of the tent are open to the view of the audience, for it is hot and what wind the occupant wants wafts weakly. The colors and stanchions of Alexander the Great are displayed before the door of the tent.

Inside the tent, Faustus is writing at a portable desk. He speaks aloud as he writes, as if to his diary.

***

Music excerpts are

portions of two suites by

Alan Hovhaness:

“And God Created Whales...”

and

“Celestial Fantasy,”

both found on this album.

The tent glides on skids, is pushed aside quickly by the gibbering naked wise men when Faustus steps out of it; it is swerved around and off to the side so that the back of the stage opens, and at the moment a sinking sun illuminates a gorgeous scene of lush forest and a riverside in golden aural light. There, women are bathing their children who play.

***

The music excerpt is

Concerto in G “alla rusitica”, RV 151, by Antonio Vivaldi.

***

The image of the society of Gymnosophists is taken from

an medieval illuminated manuscript of the Romance of Alexander.

Beside the river, on which Faustus will begin his final journey, Dandames is seated beneath the great Bodhi tree.

***

The music excerpt is Bach’s “Jesu, Joy in Man’s Desiring,” played by Christopher Parking.

The words of this hymn are by the poet Robert Bridges:

Jeus, joy of man's desiring,

Holy wisdom, love most bright;

Drawn by Thee, our souls aspiring

Soar to uncreated light.

Word of God, our flesh that fashioned,

With the fire of life impassioned,

Striving still to truth unknown,

Soaring, dying round Thy throne.

Through the way where hope is guiding,

Hark, what peaceful music rings;

Where the flock, in Thee confiding,

Drink of joy from deathless springs.

Theirs is beauty's fairest pleasure;

Theirs is wisdom's holiest treasure.

Thou dost ever lead Thine own

In the love of joys unknown.

***

The image is the painting by Thomas Cole,

“Expulsion from Eden.”

The mysterious gate of Eden is a 
breach in a rock that shall never 
be found by a living man.

Torches light the tents of thousands. But beside the river where we are centered is but one lone tent, that of Faustus, who oversees the trip to Paradise, as he always wanted to do.

All action occurs beside the river that dominates the sound of speech by its rushing noise.

***

Musical excerpt is Albinoni: Adagio In G Minor.

The image is the medieval map to Eden, as it was “before God destroyed it with the Flood.”

We stand at the river, on which Faustus will take his final journey.

In the beginning we are presented with clumsy illusion for the appearance of travel, confined to the limitations of a stage. Eventually the limits and boundaries of illusion will be defied.

For the moment, as he travels, the scenery will change by the medium of a moving stagecraft, as in an old-fashioned vaudeville; scenery will glide behind him, as it were the bank of the river, while Faustus remains stationery to the center of the stage.

***

Musical excerpt is

“The Hidden Treasure” by John Taverner, performed by the

Chilingirian Quartet.

No stage contains the scene. We are beyond capacity of our theatre. An immense tall wall, looming even to the apex of the sky, a top unseen, smoothly finished, stands across from them along the opposite shore of the river where they stood. The river, or whatever body of water it may be, like moat to the Wall, went left and right without end, but immediately next to them it churned with the chaos of the violent roaring waterfall into the imponderable deep well of it below the cliff they had climbed. The shoreline where they stood and the one beyond the waterfall, the river, and the Wall: all stretched continuously where they turned both ways to look and distantly dissolved into the haze of infinity.

Music excerpt is Hovhaness “Fra Angelico.”

In a half-light a gloomy stage is flooded with water; it flows in a loud deluge, sheeting down the face of a backlit wall, and rushing underfoot to pour into the orchestra pit where it is swallowed in a maelstrom, sucked down by a sewer.

The stage is strewn with large and small rocks, like erratics left upon a field scoured by a melted glacier; around which rocks the water guttering rips.

In the center of the stage stands Mephistophiles. He speaks above the torrent, only audible because of the magnification of loud speakers surrounding the audience.

Mephistophiles addresses the audience through a wireless microphone that he holds in his hand.

***

Music excerpt is Hovhaness “Fra Angelico.”

A sudden change:

There is no stage.

We find ourselves upon an ocean shore, dunes to one side while to the other waves that crash and wash repeatedly.

As we turn, we see Faustus body, on his belly, not moving. The wash sweeps up to swirl about his arm outstretched toward the dunes, and close-up we see that into his hand a curl of seaweed tangles in his limp fingers, coiling and foamed.

From above and behind us we hear the Chorus narrate the scene.

***

Music excerpt is Hovhaness “Fra Angelico.”

It is completely black within the cavern. At intervals, to your right or left, ahead or behind, spaces are lit where something may be seen; it should remind you of a carnival sideshow ride, a house of mechanical horrors through which you travel twisting corridors on rails, lurching in your little car, surrounded by noises of old unseen machinery, and suddenly entering into tableau vivant, vignettes revealed in vivid or moody spotlight, as the case may be, intended to shock and amaze or to affect with heartfelt distress.

***

Music excerpt is Hovhaness “Fra Angelico.”

The room in which we find ourselves appears by gradual suggestion, as if the light materially causes the appearance of things to be. They grow solid as the light delineates them, finding edges and then filling surfaces with substance and color. It begins from a beam of sunlight that reveals a window, framed in the center of the stage, against a vaguely opaque wall of black.

***

Music excerpt is

Rhapsody on a Theme from Paganini, by Rachmoninoff, pianist Artur Rubinstein.