The worst compliment you can pay an artist is to insist that he repeat himself. David Mamet's short, jolting blows to the solar plexus in works such as American Buffalo and Glengarry Glen Ross have kept us so enthralled that the arch, artificial language in Dr. Faustus, his new play at San Francisco's Magic Theatre, has thrown everybody into a tizzie.

From Christopher Marlowe's The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus (c. 1590) to John Adams's Dr. Atomic (world premiere at San Francisco Opera in 2005), the legend of Faust has long occupied Western civilization's major dramatists and composers. Yet could any match seem less made in heaven than that of Mamet, America's poet of terse, four-letter [...]