Back in the Faust lane

A decade ago, Theater Oobleck debuted playwright Mickle Maher’s version of the Faust legend, An Apology for the Course and Outcome of Certain Events Delivered by Doctor John Faustus on This His Final Evening. Audiences who found their way to the bunkerlike 6 Odum space, or later to the coach house at Berger Park, were greeted by Faust’s abstruse and haunting reflections, delivered by Maher and accompanied by the unnervingly silent presence of Colm O’Reilly as Mephistopheles.

Now Oobleck is about to remount that early triumph at the Chopin Theatre, with O’Reilly playing Faust and Wallace Shawn specialist David Shapiro as Mephistopheles.

When we meet with Maher and O’Reilly at Berger Park to discuss the past and present versions of An Apology, the coach-house door is locked, the place deserted. The main park building? Also locked. We head for some inviting café tables, but the café apparently has been shut down, the tables roped off. Maher, 46, and O’Reilly, 35, greet each setback with the resigned humor of Maher’s characters, generally set on ridiculous, fruitless quests.

“All my plays deal at some level with the comic futility of theater,” the Evanston-based writer explains, once we’ve settled for a park bench, “the way it proclaims its own importance, even if it really isn’t justified.” In the years since An Apology, those plays have included The Hunchback Variations, in which Maher as Beethoven and O’Reilly as Quasimodo tried to account for their failure to create an impossible sound; Spirits to Enforce, in which phone-banking superheroes raised money to stage The Tempest; and The Strangerer, in which O’Reilly as Jim Lehrer moderated a debate between Maher’s John Kerry and Guy Massey’s homicidal George W. Bush. These works display the ornate, quirky language and melancholy hilarity that have made Maher one of the fringe scene’s most celebrated writers.

They also underscore the close working relationship between Maher and O’Reilly, whose quiet fervor has consistently lent conviction to the playwright’s elaborate, fanciful constructions. “Doing Mephistopheles in 1999 was a new beginning for me. I’d stopped acting at that point,” O’Reilly recalls. “The play opened my eyes aesthetically, and every project I’ve worked on for Oobleck has deepened that.”

When Maher first cast O’Reilly, he’d known him not as an actor but as the son of Curious Theatre Branch founder Beau O’Reilly. But once he recognized Colm’s unique capabilities, Maher began writing parts with him in mind. “In fact,” he says, “this is the first production of mine where the speaking role wasn’t specifically written for Colm.”

While the remount reflects a decade of artistic development—“we’re trying to make it even more minimalist,” Maher says—the author resists connecting it to events in the public sphere. “The outside world doesn’t give meaning to a play; a play gives meaning to the outside world,” he insists. “The idea that Obama’s President now, say, so let’s do a play about a deal with the devil: It’s just not like that.”

Personal changes, on the other hand, do add resonance. “We both have kids now,” Maher observes (his son is seven, O’Reilly’s daughter two). “In a really perverse way, the Faustus play is about parenthood. Your privacy has been invaded, there’s this presence beyond language, and your own meaning is all wrapped up in it.” Although childless when he wrote the play, Maher found it anticipated his time as a stay-at-home dad. “The diapers, the crying, the waking up: I did a lot of talking to myself.”

Faustus sends his regrets starting Friday 25.

• More Theater articles