- OTHER MEDIA
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- Effective new look fate of 'Woyzeck'
- review in San Francisco Chronicle by Robert Hurwitt (March 17, 2007)
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- Georg Büchner was best known to his peers as a very promising,
politically radical young German scientist who'd had to flee to Zurich
after writing a revolutionary pamphlet. But he was a writer about a century
ahead of his time. "Woyzeck," a play left unfinished when he
died of typhus in 1837, has shaped much of modern drama, from Naturalism,
Expressionism and Bertolt Brecht to Dada, Surrealism and the theater of
the absurd (not to mention the influence of Alban Berg's operatic adaptation,
"Wozzeck").
- Fragmented, elliptical, acutely observed and driven by outrage at the
treatment of the poor -- by the scientific, military and mercantile establishments
-- "Woyzeck" has been widely staged for the past 100 years (it
was the play with which Berkeley Rep began in 1968). It's also still riveting,
as can be seen in Adriana Baer's visually stunning and inventive Cutting
Ball Theater staging of a vital new translation by Rob Melrose that opened
Thursday at Exit on Taylor.
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- It's a different "Woyzeck" than any current published version.
Melrose, Cutting's artistic director, went back to Büchner's four
existing, fragmentary manuscripts to try to ascertain his final intent.
He rearranged and cut some scenes, pruning the final text to a concise
70 minutes. There are passages a Büchner aficionado will miss, but
the story is clear and the dialogue is dynamic and poetically plainspoken.
The result captures much of the play's cryptic resonance and compelling
look at a personality imploding under social and psychological duress.
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- Associate Artistic Director Baer gives it a staging that blends expressionist
and impressionist approaches, with actors in exaggerated whiteface or straight
theatrical makeup and costumes (by Raquel Barreto) that range from standard
military to 1920s Berlin cabaret. Melpomene Katakalos' inspired set is
a white-on-white modern cabinet of curiosities, its endless shelves displaying
an apt miscellany of (white) scientific, military, domestic, tavern and
other props.
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- Baer opens with a cacophonous collage of voices and sound designer
Cliff Caruthers' eerily plaintive score, assaulting the stability of Chad
Deverman's preternaturally tense, goodhearted and innocent title character.
Crisp, smoothly flowing scene snippets establish Woyzeck's plight -- or
Büchner's take on what lay behind one of the most sensational court
cases of the 1820s.
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- Common soldier Woyzeck is harried by his persnickety, preachy commanding
officer (a comic David Sinaiko), starved on a diet of peas, intrusively
monitored by a dedicated scientist (an obsessive, dispassionate Ryan Oden,
in strikingly mechanistic, choreographed routines) and confused by the
man-animal acts and hopeless parables of a traveling carnival (sharply
portrayed by Rebecca Martin, Bill Selig and Felicia Benefield). He's growing
weak. He hears voices and imagines supernatural plots. When he discovers
that his beloved Marie (a radiant, torn Drea Bernardi), with whom he has
a child, is sleeping with another soldier, Woyzeck snaps. The scene in
which he kills her is realized with riveting poignancy, horror and athleticism
by Bernardi and Deverman. Its aftermath is a bit truncated (Büchner
never got to finish it, after all), but Melrose and Baer bring their "Woyzeck"
to an intriguingly open-ended close.
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