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Cabaret, The
Threepenny Opera, Macbeth — Berkeley's Shotgun
Players has a record of bucking the feel-good trend in holiday
shows. More often than not, this comes as a welcome reprieve from
the exhausting regimen of glib seasonal cheer. This year marks
a case in point, as director Mark Jackson and the company mount
the Bay Area premiere of Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan's musical
adaptation of 19th century German literary giant Georg Büchner's
Woyzeck. This version was originally conceived and staged
in 2000, in Denmark, by American avant-garde director Robert Wilson
(part of another creative triumvirate behind October's revival
of Einstein on the Beach at Cal Performances).
Although written in 1836,
Woyzeck (inspired by an 1821 murder trial) feels utterly
contemporary at its core. It's the story of a poor, half-addled,
half-haunted soldier who kills his faithless lover. Woyzeck (played
by an aptly harried-looking, volatile yet achingly sympathetic
Alex Crowther) just barely supports his girlfriend Marie (Madeline
H.D. Brown) and their infant child by working as a servant to
the local Captain (Anthony Nemirovsky) and by submitting to medical
experiments at the hands of an avid Doctor (Kevin Clarke). Marie,
though she seems to love him, is clearly troubled by Woyzeck's
erratic behavior: symptoms of what today would be labeled PTSD.
In Woyzeck's absence she succumbs to the seduction of a predatory
Drum Major (Joe Estlack). Driven into a rage of jealousy and despair,
Woyzeck stabs her to death. (Andy Alabran as dim-witted neighbor
Karl; Kenny Toll as Woyzeck's half-sympathetic pal Andres; and
a mellifluous Beth Wilmurt as neighbor and prostitute Margaret
round out the cast.)
Woyzeck is technically an
incomplete work: Büchner died of typhus (at a mere 23 years
of age) before he could complete the play, as the brilliant young
writer, medical student, and devoted pupil of the French Revolution
was trying to stay one step ahead of arrest for his social revolutionary
activities. Nevertheless, the work he left behind has a definite
shape and integrity to it that have made it an irresistible part
of the modern canon since its first production in 1913 —
a prescient year for a prescient play, whose jagged edges, violent
laughter and harrowing visions anticipate our own time and the
dehumanizing machine that gets underway in earnest with the mechanized
slaughter of 1914–18.
Woyzeck, the worried lover,
is also the lowly servant-slave-guinea pig of hubristic, ridiculous,
hypocritical authority. Although stressed and bemused by the Captain
(played as a bloated man-child in Nemirovsky's spirited interpretation)
and the Doctor (a maniacally cheerful deviant in Clarke's finely
sculpted performance), Woyzeck nevertheless manages moments of
penetrating insight into the corruption of the "moral"
order around him. Marie's pure-hearted vitality, meanwhile, underscores
its own impossibility in an inhuman regime of naked exploitation
— one only made possible, it seems, by an ideological smokescreen
of "enlightened" values, progress, and moral uplift
(concentrated, of course, in the wealthy).
