Target Margin Theater is in the process of tackling the largest most ambitious project in our fourteen year history: performing Goethe’s Faust, Parts I and II in its entirety. This is no easy feat, considering Goethe’s massive text (a whopping 12,000 lines) is the length of three productions of Hamlet combined!

Fortunately, Target Margin has taken this into account and has split the work into three stand-alone installments, each chronicling a portion of the work as a whole. Over the course of three seasons, we are presenting all three of these productions; last season's These Very Serious Jokes, our upcoming Faust in Love (a portion of which we are presenting during the APAP showcases outlined above), and next season's conclusion, tentatively titled Faust Unchained, as individual performances.

At the conclusion of the project, we intend to present all three shows in repertory, over the course of several evenings (a format we utilized with great success during our laboratory production of Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine several seasons back. (Click HERE for American Theatre magazine's feature on the project).

As epic films of recent years have shown, and our own audiences have reflected with this project, episodic blockbusters such as this are exciting events not to be missed.

A brief description of each installment follows:

These Very Serious Jokes, the first installment, introduces us to the major players and contains the philosophical opening of the play. We witness the meeting of Mephistopheles and Faust and their famous pact, immortalized in western literature. (CLICK HERE for a video sample).

Faust in Love, the second installment and our current project, tackles one of the most familiar sections of the play—Faust’s tragic romance with Gretchen, an innocent young girl who falls in love with Faust and eventually dies from the consequences of their ill-fated relationship. It presents Goethe’s Faust at its most human and most accessible (and contains several songs that, in settings by Schubert, have attained a fame all of their own).

Faust Unchained, the third and final installment features rarely seen elements of Goethe’s masterpiece; wild flights of fancy and supreme mystery as Faust approaches the spirituality that will ultimately set him free.