- OTHER MEDIA
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- Oakland Tribune March 22, 2007 (Chad Jones)
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- Cutting Ball slices into murderous 'Woyzeck' with gusto
- IF GEORG BUCHNER'S "Woyzeck" seems to be an explosion of
dramatic ideas and imagery, well, that's exactly what it is.
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- "Woyzeck" is a mess of a play about a mess of a world.
- San Francisco theater company The Cutting Ball, specialists in experimental
works and reinterpretations of classics, opened a sharp production of "Woyzeck"
last week at The Exit on Taylor.
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- Depending on your taste for the inscrutable, "Woyzeck" is
either a blissfully short — 70 minutes — slice of German Expressionism
or a fascinating piece of theatrical history that still has a lot to offer.
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- Buchner died of typhus at age 23, leaving behind only a handful of
plays and short pieces of fiction (and an influential revolutionary tract
called "The Hessian Messenger"). He wrote "Woyzeck,"
based on a real-life case of a soldier named Johann Christian Woyzeck who
was executed in 1821 for the murder of his girlfriend, the year before
he died, but the text, in bits and pieces, wasn't exactly complete.
- Editors attempted to put the thing together and published it in 1879,
though the first performance didn't arrive until 1913.
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- Alan Berg turned the story into an opera, "Wozzeck," in 1925,
and the play has been continually fiddled with ever since.
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- For The Cutting Ball production, Rob Melrose has given the text an
accessible new translation, and director Adriana Baer helps focus Buchner's
manic story with a beautifully designed and sturdily performed production.
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- What's real and what isn't in "Woyzeck" is completely up
for interpretation. You can take the story literally and assume that Woyzeck
(Chad Deverman), a 30-year-old soldier, is so mentally unstable that he
imagines all kinds of bizarre situations, including the murder of his lover,
the prostitute Marie (Drea Bernardi).
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- That would explain the presence of a white-coated scientist (Ryan Oden)
who seems to be conducting experiments on Woyzeck, one of which involves
forcing him into a diet of only peas. It might also explain the surreal
circus with a scary ringmaster (David Sinaiko), the human horse (Rebecca
Martin) and ape (Bill Selig).
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- If all of this is happening in Woyzeck's head, can we believe that
he really murders Marie in a fit of jealousy? It's hard to say.
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- That's where the other levels come in. It could be that Buchner used
the story to comment on the ways in which society, industrialization, poverty
and the like erode the human mind and turn us into savage animals.
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- Whatever the interpretation, Baer's production is always interesting
to look at. Melpomene Katakalos' mostly white set is a collage of everyday
items all neatly contained in shelves and compartments, and Melrose's lighting
plays off the whiteness to give us washes of red or green to match the
mood. He also uses the harshness of fluorescent lights to heighten the
sense of discomfort.
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- Not surprisingly, given the incomplete nature of the script, the play
ends abruptly, leaving us to sort through all the images and come to our
own conclusions.
- The actors never let the energy flag, and their physically specific,
almost dance-like movement give the action a surreal, dreamlike quality.
Deverman's Woyzeck never gives too much away — is he a victim or a
madman? We're never quite sure, and that's a good thing.
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- Bernardi's Marie is by turns lusty and fearful. At one point she says
to Woyzeck: "I'd rather have a knife in my heart than your hands on
my body." Ouch. And a special note about Bernardi: After Marie is
killed in the woods, Bernardi becomes the scariest corpse ever. As Deverman
jostles her around, her head lolls, her eyes roll back in her head, and
the audience flinches. Truly creepy. And great.
- "
- Woyzeck" is a strange theatrical experience, but strange can have
its rewards
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