Letters

FAUSTING

While I generally agree with Joel Beers' reviews of the work at my theater—good or bad—how could he have gotten the point of our current show, Faust Is Dead, so utterly wrong ["Bombs, Balls and Broads," Oct. 10]? He praises the Faust mythology but never examines how playwright Mark Ravenhill turns that story on its head: if indeed Faust is dead, then there is no Devil to sell your soul to anymore, and we are responsible for the increasing depersonalization in our individual lives. Far from a half-baked circle-jerk of praise for French philosophers, as Beers suggested, Faust Is Dead is a critique of people such as Baudrillard and Fouçault, who wasted time engaged in cynical postmodern hypotheticals—violent what-if stories about severed eyes and murder—instead of creating a philosophy that offers hope to people at the edges of life. That Beers didn't care about the zombies represented onstage is part of the point. Instead of dismissing the play because he couldn't find someone he could "like"—the lousiest critical requirement I can think of—he would have been smarter to not have taken the story at its face value and tried to think about it a little harder.

DEPT. OF CORRECTIONS

Due to an editing error, an incorrect date was listed for the upcoming videotaped gangbang rape trial involving the son of Assistant Sheriff Don Haidl. The trial is not scheduled to begin until March.