Julia Milz / Title 66 Productions

For many, good and evil are so straightforward. Truth is good, lies are bad; helping is good, hurting is bad. Easy. The History of the Devil takes the notion of black-and-white ethics and grinds it into the dirt. Its  tale of sin and sympathy, revulsion and redemption is served unflinchingly and relentlessly by the cast and crew of Title 66 Productions. The result is something slightly less than the sum of its parts, but it’s certainly not for a lack of ambition nor courage.  

With Heaven, there is also Hell. For thousands of years civilizations have lived alongside the Prince of Darkness, whose machinations have repeatedly brought woe upon humanity. Now the tables have turned. The Devil himself has been put on trial, and we are the jury. A conviction denies Lucifer of God’s grace, and binds him to a continued existence of torment on Earth. An acquittal sets him free.  

From this promising premise the script leaps through the pages of history, serving philosophical rumination alongside sex and blood. There’s Dante, beheadings, meta-ethics, and a stick-sparring session between Satan and Jesus Christ.  

The text is a smorgasbord of literary and philosophical references, none of which appear to have slipped past the cast. It takes intellectual acumen to dissect a script so obtuse, and the cast’s deft comprehension of the script was clear. The problem was more that the cast knew the script too well; there were a few rather esoteric exchanges that the actors simply charged through, leaving the audience struggling to pick up the smithereens.  

That said, this relentlessness was perhaps the single greatest strength of the production. The rapid yet focused pacing kept the show from being mired down in the density of the script. Dialogue was frictionless despite the speed, a testament to what must have been a considerable amount of time and effort devoted by the cast. In addition, Jeremy Michael Segal added precise and meticulous direction.

Unfortunately, victims to the pacing included projection—an issue most pronounced with Jane (Arielle Palik) and to a lesser degree, Sam (Kyle Mcilhone)—and enunciation. The latter was exacerbated by otherwise gorgeous masks (created by Danielle Fagen and Joshua Cape), which, when created to fit over the mouth, served to muffle nearly every actor behind them (with the notable exception of the wonderfully booming Liana Montoro).  

Amazingly, nearly all of the cast fulfilled four or more roles. Great risks carry great rewards, and this impressive feat allowed the cast to show off their great range in characterizations. Particularly outstanding was Arielle Palik, whose portrayal of a mentally disabled child that is Satan’s first mortal victim was perhaps the greatest performance of the production. As the sole actor with a single role, Lucas Chartier-Dessert’s Devil was everything the script demanded him to be: paradoxically, the most human character of all. 

Ultimately however, the production leaves an impression that is cold, clinical, and bland. Much of it is admittedly not the fault of the cast. Philosophically, playwright Clive Barker writes from the shadow of Nietzsche—a thinker that is overarchingly defined by the prefix “anti”—and makes none of the efforts of the latter at amelioration. This is why some failures of the production cannot be hung on the cast directly. No matter how much life they attempted to blow into the corpse, Barker has stubbornly slapped his script with an order of “do not resuscitate.”

As a young company, Title 66 has plenty of time to flourish. The History of the Devil proved two very important things: that its members have guts, and by implication, an iron-clad will to thrive. With luck, the rest will come in time.