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Written in 1836-7, Woyzeck
occupies a fascinating place in theater history. German playwright
Georg Büchner died at the age of 23, before completing it.
Though its story is clear — Woyzeck, a troubled soldier,
kills his girlfriend, Marie, when he discovers she's been cheating
on him with his army's drum major — Büchner left behind
only a collection of scenes, which different translators and adaptors
have arranged in different orders.
The play is also remarkable for what lies within those fragments.
Woyzeck is the first drama in Western theater to take
seriously the exploitation of the working man. Some lines anticipate
Marx and later social theories about the poor: "Us common
people, we don't have virtue," Woyzeck says to his captain
in the opening scene. "We act like nature tells us. But if
I was a gentleman, and had a hat and a watch and an overcoat,
I guess I'd be virtuous too. But I'm just a poor fella."
Nihilistic lines like "God's gone. Everything's gone"
prefigure the bleakness of 20th-century postwar philosophy and
art. But no matter which modern ideas the play is said to herald,
there is universal agreement that to have written Woyzeck when
he did, Büchner must have been a clairvoyant, a genius, or
both.
The musical adaptation running
at Shotgun Players elides many of these nuances. Originally conceptualized
by Robert Wilson, a pioneer of the American theatrical avant garde,
and with music by Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan, this version
resembles Büchner's masterpiece less than a good old-fashioned
tale of betrayal, revenge, and madness. That doesn't mean the
production, under the direction of Mark Jackson, isn't worthwhile
— just that it might be a different show than its namesake.
Woyzeck's chief oppressors
are originally his captain (Anthony Nemirovsky) and a doctor (Kevin
Clarke), obtuse caricatures of evil power whose fickle words render
Woyzeck (Alex Crowther), variously, a good man, a man without
morals, and a biological "phenomenon." But here, the
captain and doctor remain mere caricatures, the former a sugar-chasing
simpleton, the latter a bug-eyed mad scientist. The doctor as
written is paying Woyzeck to be a guinea pig in his experiment
to see if eating only peas affects ... pee. But this production
never clarifies that relationship, or many others. Karl (Andy
Alabran), a gentle village idiot, is never introduced, even as
out of nowhere he cradles Woyzeck and Marie's infant.
Marie (Madeline H.D. Brown)
and Woyzeck's relationship, on the other hand, is astoundingly
lucid, thanks to the actors' finely drawn performances. Neither
fully engages with his or her surroundings. Crowther's Woyzeck,
who says things like, "Don't you hear that terrible noise
in the sky? Over the city it's all in flames! Don't look back!"
casts his eyes always into the beyond; his periodic moments of
clarity startle and wrack him as fiercely as his nightmarish visions.
Powerless wife Marie, by contrast, distances herself, saying as
she plunges into an affair, "Everything goes to hell, anyway,"
with chilling Brechtian calm.
Waits and Brennan's songs,
which range from hard rock to more traditional musical theater
ballads to grotesque circus music, help fill the gaps in Ann-Christin
Rommen and Wolfgang Wiens's adaptation. "Coney Island Baby,"
Woyzeck's eulogy for a lost love, becomes a potent weapon when
sung by the drum major (Joe Estlack); "All the World Is Green"
offers glimmers of the man Woyzeck once was. As singers, the ensemble
members show quality musicianship: Beth Wilmurt's Margaret, a
narrator, blends her voice with the live clarinet as if the two
were the same instrument; Crowther sings "I fell into the
ocean when you became my wife," with a voice so tremulous
it could have been submerged in icy waters.
The clearest illustration
of Woyzeck's position as an oppressed proletariat comes from Nina
Ball's set design, which, through the use of bold diagonals, makes
the family's already tiny, dingy kitchen feel pushed in from all
sides. In other aspects of this production, Woyzeck is less a
clearly defined part of a social order than just a man who, once
cuckolded, can no longer fight his battle against insanity. But
that still makes for great drama.
