Word: buechner
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Having seen several recent productions of Georg Buechner's cryptic drama Woyzeck, I still cannot understand the fascination it holds for young directors. Buechner died at 23 in 1837. He left behind, among other writings, a jumbled, partly illegible manuscript of an unfinished play based on the real-life case of Johann Christian Woyzeck, an army barber executed in 1824 for the murder of his mistress. The order of scenes in this manuscript is indeterminate; some scenes are mere fragments. The ending of the play is unclear. The dialogue in both the German original and most translations borders on psychotic...
Perhaps the play's appeal has to do with the success of Alban Berg's opera Wozzeck (whose title, incidentally, is a misspelling arising from an editor's error). Certainly Berg's music gives the Buechner work a substance it lacks as a play. On the other hand, the original version has a certain power about it that derives at least in part from its starkness. I have an uneasy feeling that it would be much less appealing to young directors (and audiences) had Buechner lived to finish it and polish the rough edges...
John Lithgow, who directs the present production, played the Doctor in a Woyzeck at Princeton this summer, and the Harvard Dramatic Club staged another Woyzeck right here in Cambridge this August. The current one does little to ease my own reservations about Buechner's so-called masterpiece...
...George Buechner's Wozzeck, directed by John A. Lithgow '67, is the expressionistic treatment of the private life of a soldier. The 19th-century work will be produced in early November...
...plot is not the point. Buechner was concerned with destiny, not destinations, and Woyzeck, sensitively played by Heinrich Schweiger, is a lyric dirge to bruised humanity. The play is as durable and compassionate as the line that might have served as its epigraph: "Every man is an abyss, and you get dizzy looking into...