Taper Forum in Los Angeles commissioned from him a new adaptation of Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus (1588-89), to feature in Edward Parone's New Theatre for Now series. In due course the Taper declined to stage the finished script, Man Fly: A Play, with Music, in 2 Acts, but ended up producing Angel City instead during its 1976-77 anniversary season. The script nevertheless invites comparison with John Whiting's The Devils (Royal Shakespeare Company, 1961), the Taper's very first and highly successful 1966 production, based on Aldous Huxley's seventeenth-century tale of witchcraft and demonic possession, The Devils of Loudun, and resonating with Arthur Miller's The Crucible (1953). Insofar as Shepard's protagonist manifests his boundless aspiration by wagering his soul in return for the mind-altering (and highly profitable) capacity to speak in tongues, the adaptation also anticipates Tongues (1978), the collaboration with Joseph Chaikin resulting in part from the desire to have him direct Man Fly when the Taper abandoned the project. To date Man Fly remains unproduced and unpublished. As late as 1986 Shepard was still enthusing about a possible film version of Marlowe's play, taken as he is by its “incredible language” marked by a strong musical quality. During Shepard's stay in England, though, Faustus's dissatisfaction with the sciences of his day must have struck a sensitive chord in the playwright who was then suffering from a lack of inspiration. Going by his other plays featuring artist figures struggling with the muses, from Melodrama Play (1967) via Angel City (1976) to True West (1980), that fearful condition even amounts to a chronic one. Small wonder Shepard turned the doctor of divinity disappointed by traditional academic disciplines into a writer. His acknowledged models are Whitman, Kerouac (B45), and Faulkner (B2), but his tale contains echoes of Kiowa lore, Hemingway (“The Snows of Kilimanjaro”),