'Woyzeck': waaay beyond the pleasure principle

By Larry Switzky

Hardly a moment goes by in director J. J. Lind's, SM '00, starkly original production of Georg Buchner's cryptic final play, Woyzeck, without some nuance discovered, some sacrilege committed, some interpretation ripped screaming from the fragmentary text. At its height, it tests the limits of theatrical art; at its nadir, it tests the viewer's patience. Antonin Artaud proposed a Theater of Cruelty. Lind and his cast respond with a Theater of Apoplexy.

ANDREW HEID/YH Louis Cancelmi, SY '00, and Michael Smart, SM '00: "See? I've only got two."

Buchner's text—left incomplete at the author's death in 1837, when he was only 23—is a study, at once clinical and humane, of the growing madness of former soldier-turned-hairdresser Franz Woyzeck. The oddly childlike Woyzeck murders his wife, Marie, in a fit of sacred rage about—well, everything: her apparent affair with a drum major, the unbearable fact of his physical body, the voices in his head. Buchner attempts to understand Woyzeck's crime as a series of linked influences, but instead he leaves us with the final tragedy of its inexplicability. As Woyzeck himself realizes, "Every man is a chasm; it makes you dizzy when you look down in."

Lind's production takes this proposal at face value, especially the bit about dizziness. The project of the show is a projection of its protagonist's madness—the creation of a topsy-turvy universe where a character like Woyzeck could be possible. Clayton Binckley's, SM '99, brilliant set does triple duty as stage, projection screen, and white board—a cyclorama that is easily the best design work ever done in the Whitney Humanities Center theater space. It suggests the claustrophobic blank slate of Woyzeck's mind and the sterility of an operating theater.

This sense of duality carries over into the production itself. Is Woyzeck wearing an industrial uniform or a strait jacket? Are the voices that guide him the product of schizophrenia or divine prophecy? In this production, there is never a doubt that Woyzeck is profoundly disturbed. Zakary Cushing, BK '00, portrays him as sensitive, but severely off-kilter. In the first scene, he shaves the Captain's (Angus Beasley, DC '01) face as though he were on speed and out-of-synch with the rest of humanity. In the background, Woyzeck's slutty wife Marie (Elizabeth Vacco, SM '00), the insanely verbose Doctor (Michael Smart, SM '00), and a drag queen amalgam of several roles, the Charlatan (Louis Cancelmi, SY '00), watch on, alternately frightened, amused, and predatory.

These eminently confident actors use Buchner's text as a springboard, freely interpolating speeches in French, running gags, improvising speeches on scientific progress, and composing two hours of material for a script that barely cracks 30 pages. They construct some brilliantly loopy set pieces, suggesting that Woyzeck is a victim of the alienation and cruelty he finds everywhere. In the face of a universe that defies either scientific or religious explication, the only proper reaction is insanity. In one of the best comedic scenes, Buchner's skeletal trip to a local fair is turned into a dazzling, slightly terrifying circus, with a high wire swing, Vacco, Beasley, and Smart whooping it up like circus animals, and Cancelmi as a silky-voiced impresario. Lind's ensemble also plays quiet moments with great poise, as when Cushing's Woyzeck delivers a devastatingy nihilistic speech, reducing human nature to its basest essence à la Hamlet—"What is man? Bone, dust, sand, dung." The other characters look on, perplexed, mocking—above all, human. At other times, the production's energy results in tedious histrionics. Smart does a credible job with the mad scientist who feeds his patient a diet of peas for three months in the name of medical progress, hilariously flinging Woyzeck around the office. Yet his screaming begins to grate, and the scene drags on beyond where it has the power to disturb or to entertain. In the long middle portion of the play, one over-long episode gives way to another. A surfeit of clever interpretive devices merely produces exhaustion, clouding the cumulative maddening effects of this nightmare world. Lind would have done well to cut the play short; as it stands, the naturalistic conclusion comes too quickly and makes no sense. Woyzeck as a character gets lost in the crossfire. While the inspired stagecraft and elaborate special effects invigorate the play, they sometimes seem like an escape from the difficult psychological story lurking beneath the artifice.

For all its relentless invention, this Woyzeck finds its greatest power in restraint. Images of enlarged lips, fetishized male body parts, and nudity that exposes a torso or a leg, projected onto the sides of the stage, have a greater power to tantalize (and repulse) than any amount of shock theatre or pyrotechnics. Sex is performed as a sort of erotic ballet, just as the male virility that eludes the effeminate Woyzeck is exemplified merely by Beasley's macho posturing.

At its best, Woyzeck eludes paraphrase, though it's most like falling asleep with the television on after reading Freud. Despite some problems in pacing, its powerful images and disturbing truths, like all good boogey men, linger long after the illusion is over.

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